Sending a Silly Meme Is an Act of Love

At this moment, an untold number of TikTok videos are being sent without commentary to an untold number of group chats.

The videos might remind the senders of their mom, their spouse, their high-school best friends.

They might strike the recipients as charming—or as smartphone pollution.

The meme-sharing never stops.

People have been sending one another memes nearly as long as the web has been worldwide, gathering amusing bits of internet ephemera and texting, emailing, or sharing it on social media with their loved ones.

Before it was TikToks and Instagram Reels, it was I Can Has Cheezburger? links posted to Facebook walls. (Even before the internet existed, people engaged in meme-sharing-like behavior: your grandma clipping articles from the newspaper that she thought you might like, for instance.) As communication goes, sending a meme is one of the lowest-lift—one might even say laziest —ways to stay in touch.

It’s barely a step above not saying anything at all.

But a surprisingly large body of research on meme-sharing has found that it can serve an important function in relationships and bring people closer together.

According to Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, sending memes can be a form of “pebbling”—a term that he, appropriately, saw on social media.

It refers to a behavior among gentoo penguins, in which they present potential mates with carefully selected, shiny pebbles.

Among humans, giving the gift of a carefully selected, shiny meme can be a mating behavior, too, or a platonic one. [ Read: The meme that defined a decade ] “These aren’t trivial gestures—every pebble is a bid for connection,” Grant writes in his new book, Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World .

Clicking “Share” on a funny Instagram post is hardly on the level of inviting a friend to dinner, as bids for connection go.

But neither is it nothing.

At minimum, it’s a way of checking in and reminding someone of your relationship.