02 October 2015 nonfiction, "Love in My Generation"

It kind of upsets me when I hear people of my generation complaining about how love is nonexistent in our current culture. That the modern form of dating is a shallow, soulless variation that relies on our addiction to change and physical attraction. That the generations before us, though not without their flaws, knew how to love each other right, to focus on fixing something that was broken, instead of simply ditching the old for the new.

I don’t necessarily disagree with these statements about my generation as a whole; we have a new mentality of modernity and technology and live in quite a “throw away” society.

But love isn’t gone. We still know how to do it; it’s just become blinder.

In a time full of the shiny and new, the time of constant communication and fabulous opportunities for the innovative, it’s hard to label the way we interact as even close to what it was twenty years ago. We are in constant communication with everyone else; the amount of time we spend with our peers is virtually endless. We can’t get away from the kids we go to school with, grew up with, made mistakes with. The glow of a phone screen represents so much more than the adults who watch us with judgment think.

It isn’t wrong, it’s just the way we’ve learned to develop. And to those naysayers that say the way to solve problems of our society is to simply unplug, I challenge to remember what their parents disapproved of when they were growing up. I challenge them to imagine what life would have been like if they were the only ones among their peers who didn’t have something everyone they knew did. But I digress.

I met my current boyfriend on Tinder. And even as I type this, I wonder what he’s doing, why he hasn’t messaged me back yet. And after wondering the basics, I wonder about our relationship, but more specifically, I wonder about our relationship as it appears, as it’s been told through the story I’ve presented online. He isn’t perfect, and neither am I. We aren’t perfect together, but at our age, I suppose that’s normal.

And yet a good amount of the time I find myself angry at him for things he hasn’t done, for things I see other couples doing, other boyfriends saying, other girlfriends posting, and all of this online. Who’s to say an instagram famous couple my age has a relationship any more mature or developed than mine? I know this is the truth, and yet the pictures leave me constantly questioning—am I doing it right? Why doesn’t my life look like that, like theirs appear to look all the time?

And within the pursuit of this perfect world, I find another flaw in the love of my generation: we wish, but no longer trust our wishes to come true. In hot pursuit of something, anything to take and embellish online to fit in, we romanticize something we have. Though what we have isn’t perfect, it is better to have something than nothing. Not to be confused with the “it’s worth it to fix it” mentality of the past, I talk about the idea that we must have instant gratification, that the first thing we can get is enough, and can be embellished well enough to make us worthy. I don’t know what it used to be like, but I hear the words I love you tossed around a lot these days between people my age and far younger than me. It hasn’t lost its meaning, I believe we still have respect for what it represents, but love is no longer coveted, no longer waited for, because we all rush forward and take it right away. And often this happens before we’re ready, causing us to get ourselves nothing but hurt in the process.

Like I said before, I’m a child of my generation, and even as I speak of the woes of instant gratification and small attention spans, I hypocritically wonder what pictures I’m missing on Instagram right now, have to fight the urge to log into Facebook on the easily accessible phone in my hand or browser inches from my cursor.

I don’t think my generation is dumb, and even more importantly, I don’t think we are oblivious to what is happening to and around us. I just think we have difficulty separating ourselves individually from an online and everpresent society that has become designed to engulf us totally.