Post-Modern Love

He took her hands into his and gazed deeply into her captivating hazel eyes. The sun illuminated each speckled design surrounding her dilated irises as they sat on a blanket in the tall grass, swaying slightly with the wind. It was as if he could tell, gazing into those sumptuous puddles, feeling her pulse flowing faster and faster from that one motion of taking her hand, that she felt the same. Everything was right.
“Let’s live like this for eternity?” he questioned.
“Forever,” she whispered back.
Several months later after tying the knot, the couple began questioning what they thought was true love. There was the constant bickering between the two, his addiction to video games, and hers to the Twilight series. They could never seem to find time for each other anymore; no, not with all the zombie shooting and vampire romance to attend to. Turning to the resources around them—Google and other dating sources—they sought relationship advice. Dating for Dummies clearly spelled out their incompatibility. Not only did their horoscopes not match up, but they didn’t even have a love song. Then that fateful day came, he got a text message that he’d never forget. The new message! warning rang out. Thinking it was a cute text from his lady he flipped open his phone, but was horrified to see instead in a small new courier font that fateful phrase: It’s over. Never had he received such a crushing text as this.

What is love? Having the hottest boyfriend or girlfriend to brag about? Making out behind the bleachers? A new relationship every week? It’s hard to tell anymore. Love and relationships are supposed to be something unique for every individual, a connection that bonds two people together forever. It is something to be cherished and handled with care Recently, however, it seems relationships have become more standardized as everyone turns to similar methods and advice in either finding or keeping a relationship.
Relationships in the past used to consist of courtship. The guy would ask permission to date the daughter and normally they wouldn’t even leave the supervision of the parents. Often girls were even set up with a man whom they would marry. Dating like this was strictly social oriented. Each person got to fully know the other before a true relationship bloomed and marriage possibly followed. Although this form of relationship building may seem unexciting, it was better than relationships nowadays in that there was substance to “love.” Couples weren’t just together out of lust or for popularity. They spent time getting to know each other and with such time together there was communication and the building up of trust.
Today it seems like with every new invention, what we’re calling innovations, relationships are becoming technological and far from the courtship rituals of the past. How your Facebook profile picture portrays you, or how you’re described in your profile information online, characterizes if you’re the ideal candidate for a relationship. It’s all about how we appear, how savvy we are in text messaging. We lure unknown strangers in with cliché words and overused catch phrases, with no thoughts about a true relationship.
Even friendship among couples has shifted and disappeared. We’ve moved beyond building up steady relationships and have replaced it with teenage pregnancies at age 13. What happened to compassion and putting all else aside to put the one you love before everything? Communication and acquaintance are now defined by video chats, online dating, social websites, and texting. Individuals feel pressured to exploit their bodies physically in order to fit in and to have relationships. Plastic surgery and liposuction have destroyed self-confidence.
No one knows what a relationship is like anymore. It’s all been lost in the façade of entertainment devices which suck up and replace social skills, feeding our minds with garbage on how we should look, how we must socialize, and how we must find and keep dates. TV, magazines, internet, cell phones, all flash before our eyes, feeding us whatever they can make money off of. There’s all that advice out there now on how to be “the perfect girlfriend, the perfect boyfriend.” But how can you ever be that if you waste all of your time trying to be what others want you to be? You have to be yourself in order to make your own personal relationship even last.
At the rate true relationships are presently vanishing, there’s no telling what the future holds. One can only imagine what new devices will be around by then. Maybe we’ll have virtual partners and the ability to create our own ideal robot significant other. Relationships will become entirely computer- based. Couples will live electronically—scheduling to fulfill successful, preplanned relationships that are commonly broadcasted everywhere. Maybe we’ll have the technology to make each of us super beings—sporting perfect bodies and perfect lives, just what we need for successful relationships.
If humans were all the same and were perfect, had no flaws or discrepancies, life wouldn’t be any fun. We’d have nothing to base our relationships around if everything was all planned out for us or if we followed all the “guidelines.” Love and relationships are different for every person, but the significance and role of each relationship is commonly shifting for every individual. In order to discover how we can truly love another being, we must return to the days of communication, closeness and of knowing ourselves in order to understand and truly love another person. We must to return to the long walks through the meadow, a beach, or forest, and put away the Blackberry’s, the iPads, the cell phones. Recognizing that love is an emotion that requires effort, not a technological device, is imperative.