From romantic couple videos and relationship advice to "relationship goals": social media shows teenagers and young people every day what relationships are supposed to look like. Since Instagram, TikTok and similar platforms are used by a large share of teenagers, they have a considerable influence on their attitudes, decisions and behaviour. But how does online content actually shape teenagers' expectations and ideas of romantic relationships?
Teenagers are considered highly sensitive to the influence of social media. While children are still more protected by their parents and adults can, in the best case, make critical decisions on their own, teenagers are very sensitive to the opinions of their peers, among other reasons because of neurological changes. During this time, the feeling of social belonging plays a major role, and today social media fulfils it more and more.
When it comes to how young people are influenced on social media, it is worth looking at the psychological principle of vicarious learning. According to Bandura's social cognitive theory, people learn by taking other people as models, observing their behaviour and imitating it. When the behaviour of an observed person is rewarded, this causes vicarious reinforcement in the person observing.
As early as the 1980s, Bandura recognised that a behavioural model does not have to be a physically present person. According to Bandura, so-called symbolic models can show role models through mass media of all kinds. While back then it was mainly about television, today social media is at the centre.
For example, teenagers see an influencer who shares their life or opinion on social media and receives countless likes and approving comments for it. The influencer acts as the model, their content as the observed behaviour and the likes as reinforcement, that is, as an incentive to show this behaviour themselves. The more an influencer is perceived as successful and popular, the more likely a viewer is to try to imitate parts of this behaviour, provided the viewer believes they are capable of doing so.
On Instagram, TikTok and similar platforms, mainly relationships that attract a lot of attention are shown: the happiest moments, elaborate gifts, romantic holidays. But relationships between people go much deeper than that and include conflicts, insecurities and everyday challenges. You see very little of this on the internet. According to social learning theory, these positive aspects of relationships are indeed picked up and possibly imitated, while the more complex parts of relationships are neglected.
This incomplete picture of romantic relationships can give young people the impression that their own relationships have to look just as exciting. The focus is mainly on impressive but superficial snapshots, such as expensive gifts. But when it comes to the everyday interplay in a partnership, knowledge is missing about how to deal with conflict situations or how to bring up disagreements.
Despite this negative outlook, it must be stressed that many teenagers are well aware that most portrayals on social media are polished and simplified, just as on television. The big difference, however, is the supposed authenticity of influencers, whose phone-camera videos like to give the impression that everything they are doing is unrehearsed and real.
Social media has rapidly catapulted itself into a central position in our society and is not going away any time soon. Whatever we think of it, many teenagers will take creators as role models and internalise ideas about relationships as they are portrayed on social media. These range from very instructive to toxic role models.
The only way forward, short of restricting the use of social media, seems to be this: teenagers need to build their values about relationships outside the internet and learn to look at media content critically and with nuance. Only then can they learn to question idealised portrayals of relationships and tell staged online content apart from real partnerships.
– Nikolas Böhnel, 28 October 2026