With Valentines Day coming up quickly, I have been doing a lot of reflecting about love and how I define it. Then I realize how the millennial generation, much like this pointless holiday of love, has such a backwards idea of what true love is.
In a way, my generation’s definition of love is much like Valentines Day. They define it based off of superficial, chocolate filled hearts and the number of flowers delivered to their doorstep. They want a big romantic gesture to put on twitter to brag, and an expensive necklace to show all their friends. In short, they live for the very good days, the days where they are showered with gifts and attention.
But here’s the thing; Valentines Day is overrated, and so is the new definition of love.
What we don’t have is a day opposite to Valentine’s Day. Maybe like a “fight day” where we acknowledge that love is not always rainbows. A day that shows that love is beyond life-size teddy bears, diamond rings, and edible arrangements. Love takes effort, grit, patience, and most importantly, forgiveness.
Because the fact is, love is not always perfect like Valentines Day and my generation expects it to be. As much as it is full of chocolates and flowers, it is also full of tears and heartache. The true definition of love is not defined by the things they get you, or how many retweets you get on a picture, or even whether or not people label you as “goals”.
Real love, true love, that we seem to have lost sight of is the love that doesn’t waver during your “fight days”. A love that embodies forgiveness and recognizes your own faults, and accepting your partners for theirs.
It has been proven recently that divorce rates have skyrocketed. I’m no psychologist, but I learned from my Science of Relationship class that this is due to people’s lack of ability to get over the bump. People believe that your significant other needs to meet all of your physical and emotional needs, which, to be blunt is, naive and impossible.
People have to realize that just as much as the person you love makes you happy, there are days where they will make you sad. The key is not to get divorced the minute the honeymoon effect wears off, but to work past the bump with complete dedication to the relationship and I think people have lost sight of that. So for this Valentine’s Day, I encourage everyone to rethink how they define love because when used and defined correctly there is nothing more fragile, and quite frankly, beautiful.
