I recently fell in love with a man five years older and with much more experience in relationships than I. I was scared of telling him I loved him, but when I couldn’t keep the words inside any longer, I blurted them out. He said nothing. I cried tears of confusion and embarrassment in the realization that I was, in fact, what I feared most—naïve. Through my tears, I told him that I had to go; I didn’t want him to realize that underneath my tough and stubborn shell, I was just as fragile and sensitive as the rest of them. Finally, as I was pulling away, he said, “I love you.” “Say it again,” I said. He looked me straight in the eye: “No.”
When I pressed him, he explained, “It’s obvious that we’re in love; anyone can see that. Once you say ‘I love you,’ it’s over, you no longer feel the need to find other ways of expressing yourself. Saying ‘I love you’ kills all imagination…” I was stunned—I had never thought about it that way before. Yet, it made sense to me: The concept of love has become so large as to encompass all surrounding emotions and thus mean nothing at all.
There are so many different types of love today that the use of the word begs explanation, yet most of us fail to clarify what we mean and instead merely fall back on what we’re used to saying. We should put to use all the vocabulary our parents made us memorize for the SATs and start explaining ourselves. But do we know how? When you utter the words “I love you,” what are you really saying? If even you don’t know what you’re saying, it seems silly to think you’re getting across what you mean. Too often, people say “I love you” because it’s second nature—it’s what you’re supposed to say when you care about someone. Some say love is too great to be put into words, that love surpasses language, but to me that just seems like a girly load of crap. We use one word to cover so many emotions that we couldn’t possibly be getting across what we mean. In some sense it speaks to the efficient, or rather, lazy ways of our generation.
In our demanding, over-scheduled lives, where we have so much going on that even taking a walk with someone needs to be penciled in, do we have time to figure out how we feel? More and more, we view sex and dating as just another item on our long list of extra-curricular activities.
Conventions for how to navigate the world of love are quickly vanishing. It’s no longer a matter of asking someone out to dinner and a movie and hoping for a goodnight kiss—most college students don’t even date anymore. Recently, a handful of guys have asked me out for coffee and I’ve been so taken aback that I don’t know how to respond—who does that?! And yet, if asking someone on a date is (in some twisted way) bizarre or creepy, how are you supposed to go about getting into a relationship with someone?
In this new dating environment, it has become necessary to develop ways of asking someone out without asking him or her “out,” and the possibilities are endless, necessitating creativity and imagination. Figuring out your personal dating style, like mastering your writing style, can take a lot of practice. With all the thinking and working that a relationship requires, sometimes I think it should be curricular.
Technological progress and the growth of the internet broaden our range of choices, but not necessarily with good results. The ever-growing popularity of Facebook and other online social networks makes it possible to learn about and be in contact with a person without ever physically interacting (sorry, online virtual pokes don’t count). Through Facebook profiles and MySpace pages, you can learn about someone’s personality, experiences, interests and looks without even so much as saying hello. Thus, before a relationship or even the idea of a relationship with someone begins, the internet gives you the capability to “get to know” a person and see if his or her qualities and appearance appeal to you. After that, there is no defined next step—the ways of proceeding are infinite.
Paradoxically, when love or lust fizzles out and lovers part ways, enhanced communication makes it almost impossible (for all but those who are capable of exercising extreme self-control) to completely let go of someone. For example, if one night you’re lonely, in three seconds you can send a text message to an ex-beau, and if your recipient is obliging, you are sucked back into a world that you otherwise could have left behind had it not been so simple to return to. It’s so easy and therefore so tempting. I’ve had to delete and re-enter one ex’s number in my cell phone so many times that I’d need four hands and feet to count them all, just to stop myself from sending him a message when I get…restless. I’ve come to terms with the fact that in the realm of relationships I often have trouble controlling myself—when I get it into my head that I want to do something, there isn’t much that can stop me, and the ability to communicate so easily only makes it worse.
With the ability to contact a person comes more uncertainty as to what is actually being said. How many times has a friend, male or female, come to you with a message from another person and said, “But what does she mean?” or “What does he mean?” To decipher the English language, sometimes we must use everything we can—inflection, body language, facial expression—but when you have only words, decoding meaning can be extremely difficult. The mere use of a smiley face at the end of a sentence can change an entire email from mean to playful, but we can only rely so much on those also sometimes confusing little things.
Another negative aspect of enhanced communication comes after you have contacted someone. Technology has become so advanced that there is little doubt today whether messages are received: When we email or text message someone, we expect that person to receive our message immediately. When waiting for a response, knowing the recipient has probably received our message and could reply instantly makes the waiting even harder. We’ve all had these conversations: “Why hasn’t he responded? He must have gotten it…” And then, in spite of technology’s development, we start doubting it: “Did he get it? Maybe it didn’t go through…”
Does this ability to communicate take the romance out of romance? Where is the glamour in our lives? While glamour is often the false image of romance and not romance itself, we all crave it once in a while. I say this not as a person who has recently returned from studying in the alluring and romantic city of Paris, but as someone who occasionally daydreams of being Audrey Hepburn in the original 1954 Sabrina. Glamour certainly isn’t found in our current cultural trend—wearing pajamas to class during the week and “hooking up” with random people on the weekends.
Do we no longer have a system of values? At heart, I agree with Frank Sinatra—for me it’s “all or nothing at all.” Yet, as much as I do think I’d look uber-cute in a tiny-waisted full skirt, we’ve passed the 1950s and left behind the idealized and glamorous image of love that came with it. Gone are the days of assumed chivalry and grand gestures. Either no set foundation of interpersonal values exists, or it has become so skewed as to be rendered nonexistent and impossible to follow. The reason there are so few guidelines concerning dating, or not dating for that matter, is that our values are changing as well. It’s no longer the society of free love of the 1960s, nor the society of love fraught by AIDS, but is it a society with any specific notion of love at all?
Modern love is in disrepair—sex and love have been separated from each other. The challenge, for some, is to bring the two back together despite the many societal forces working against them. Others revel in the notion of sex without strings attached and fooling around just for the sake of having a good time. This leaves those of us trying to define modern love running for our money—we can’t do it. Defining modern love would look like a scientific chart with thousands of different dots on a sliding scale with sex on one end and love on the other. And yet, despite the myriad of different types of relationships existing today, we still say “I love you.” Thinking back on when I blurted it out, I wonder if I ever loved him, and he me, or if I just felt overwhelmed in the moment. If I had really loved him, wouldn’t we be together now? Isn’t that the idea? Maybe, in fact, they were just words without music…
I don’t know if love is everlasting, but the desire to be loved certainly is. Mark Twain once defined love as being “the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired,” a definition which does not separate, but instead binds together selfishness and feelings towards another. Ultimately, we all want to be wanted. And yet this does not distinguish modern love from the love of previous generations. Love has been, and always will be, on some level, inherently selfish. In a way, it seems silly to try and define modern love as opposed to the love of other generations because love is timeless. While all our new forms of communication should ostensibly let us communicate better with one another and understand each other on a deeper level, leading us into a more honest and open kind of love, they don’t. Forget about the fact that emails and text messages often bring more confusion than clarity. On some level, people will always be closed to one another, and all the communication in the world can’t change that fact. So when someone tells you they love you, ultimately you’re still guessing what they mean or if they really mean it.
And yet, even though we might be alone on some basic level, everyone wants to be able to transcend that loneliness. What remains the same through the ages is the feeling you get when you realize you like someone or when he or she kisses you for the very first time. Maybe now it’s cool to pretend that we don’t care and that kisses, or even just crushes without kisses, mean nothing to us, but inside we remain the same; even through the societal onset and subsequent dominance of cynicism, we still feel that rush of excitement, still get those butterflies in our stomach every now and again and still get nervous about even the prospect of passing someone on the way to class. And on some level, those emotions cannot be put into words, no matter how large a vocabulary or how much imagination we might have. Just knowing I’m capable of feeling that way makes me feel good about myself, and knowing there are people around me who feel that way too instills in me more confidence in this lost generation.