From the time we read our first fairy tales, we are bombarded with ideas of what love should be. Now, with our lives splayed across social media pages, it often feels like there are more voices than ever telling us what our romantic relationships should look like. 

The two central couples of Così fan tutte, who start the show in picture-perfect, Instagramable relationships, have seemingly met every #relationshipgoal  - they have found partners who are young, wealthy, good-looking, and willing to loudly exclaim just how much they love each other to anyone within earshot. But their focus on the outward appearance of their relationship comes with a high susceptibility to outside influences… so when Ferrando and Guglielmo’s cynical friend Don Alfonso proposes a bet to test the fidelity of their girlfriends, the boys instantly take the bait. After all, Don Alfonso proposes, men should be non-commital, aloof, and untrusting of women. The girls, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, are also told how they should behave in love by their world-weary personal assistant, Despina - women should be coy, free-spirited, and untrusting of men. 

Cosí fan tutte roughly translates to “All Women are Like That,” as a reference to Don Alfonso’s thesis that all women are ultimately unfaithful. Of course, just as "all women" are susceptible to displaying less kind qualities to their loved ones, so are all men. The show has a subtitle well, La scuola degli amanti, or “The School for Lovers.” But the school in reference is not the lessons of masculinity and femininity in romance that Don Alfonso and Despina try to impose on our young couples. Instead, the hardest lesson the couples must learn is that picture-perfect relationships built upon outside standards don’t exist. In order to find real moments of connection, we have to acknowledge the less photogenic aspects of ourselves and our partners - jealousy, selfishness, insecurity, loneliness - and face together them within our relationships, rather than airbrushing them out of the picture.