Modern day romance makes me absolutely livid.
To put it quite simply, I was born in the wrong generation.
We live in an era where being someone's best friend on Snapchat has come to be more valued than a face-to-face conversation, and liking three selfies in a row on Instagram has come to be the equivalent to flirting. Dating has been replaced by one night stands, or taking two seconds to judge someone's profile on Tinder and decide whether or not to swipe left or right.
This is the world we live in today, and to be quite frank: it horrifies me.
Have we really become so out of touch with romance, or are we simply just being lazy? Is it accurate to say that we actually hate commitment, or are we afraid to admit that we simply don't want to be let down, again, and again, and again?
After almost two decades of being on this planet, I've come to a realization: We are afraid to show how we really feel. We've built a wall around our emotions because we don't want to be judged. We don't want to let someone else tap into our inner feelings for fear of being perceived as vulnerable, so we've become distant. God forbid we actually start to care.
It's a vicious cycle my friends. We're stuck in a constant "the grass is always greener on the other side" mentality because we're simply afraid of missing out. So we're constantly looking for the next best thing. We don't invest time in an actual connection, because something about committing more than twenty minutes of our life to anything absolutely terrifies us. And we've stopped looking for the right person because it's convenient. It's easy. Yet somehow, we've still managed to over-complicate things.
And what have we created? The whirl-wind of the "hookup culture" that seems to baffle not only those standing on the outside looking in, but those engulfed in it as well. And I know that I am not alone when I say that I feel like I am slowly drowning in it.
No one seems to know what's going on because everything is so darn complicated. There's no such thing as asking someone to go out on a date, it's asking someone to hang out. Only to spend the entire week after said "hangout" ignoring each other and pondering what exactly the encounter meant. We constantly play games and have all of these twisted rules and labels that don't even seem to make sense to us.
Let's take a look at just a few,shall we: Don't text first because it will make you seem clingy; Don't double text; Don't ask to hang out two times in a row because he'll think you're getting too attached; If he hasn't texted back in a few hours and you just so happen to have your phone in your hands when he does, don't respond right away, because then you seem too eager or too desperate; If he opens your Snapchat and doesn't respond within five minutes it's definitely game over, you might as well move to a different continent now; Everything has to appear effortless; If you actually like the person, you can't act too interested or you're considered crazy. We craft every text to make it seem as if we've put no thought into it, even though we all know that we've spent hours poring over whether or not to send hey with one or two y's.
It's honestly the most exhausting game I've ever had to play. Since when has expressing our feelings become the exception and not the norm?
So my two cent's opinion is that we need to stop playing games, put down our devices, and actually start talking. Let's stop hiding behind our screens and our 140-character subtweets. If you like someone tell them. If along the way you realize you don't, that's fine, but don't play with their emotions. Let's stop ignoring people and hoping they'll go away if we leave them with unanswered texts. Let's be considerate of each other's feelings and maybe we won't leave so much collateral damage along the way. And let's actually tell people what we want from the start.
It would save us a lot of heartache along the way. Just saying.
