Why is maintaining a relationship so difficult today? Why do we experience love failures so often and despite our many efforts? Why have human beings suddenly become incapable of having a relationship? Have we forgotten how to love? Or worse, have we forgotten what love is?
1. We are not ready . We are not ready to make sacrifices, to compromise, to love unconditionally. We are not ready to invest all that is necessary for a relationship to work. We want everything to be easy. We give up quickly. At the first obstacle, everything collapses. We do not allow our love to grow, we leave before it has time.
2. It is not love that we seek , but only passion and the thrill. We want someone to watch movies with and go to parties, not someone who understands us. We spend time together, but we don’t create memories. We don’t want this boring life.
We do not want a partner for life, but simply someone who allows us to feel alive in the present, at an instant t. When passion fades, we discover that we are absolutely not ready for any reality. We do not see the beauty of what is predictable: we are blinded by the thrill of adventure.
3. We are immersed in the insignificance of city life and this leaves no room for love. We don’t have time to love. We don’t have the patience to manage a relationship . We are busy chasing away our materialistic dreams from which love is excluded. Relationships are nothing more than stepping stones.
4. We seek immediate satisfaction in everything we do – in our online publications, in our professional choices and with the people with whom we fall in love. From a relationship, we expect the maturity that only comes with time, the emotional bonds that take years to create and a feeling of belonging; when we barely know each other. It seems that nothing deserves our time and patience, not even love.
5. We prefer to spend an hour with a hundred different people, rather than spending an entire day with just one of them. We like to have a choice. We are social beings. We prefer to meet people rather than getting to know them. We are greedy.
We want to have it all. We get together as a couple at the slightest sign of attraction and break up as soon as we find someone better. We don’t want to see the best in this person. We want it to be perfect. We hang out with a whole bunch of people, but never give them a real chance. Everyone disappoints us.
6. Technology has brought us together so much that it is impossible for us to breathe. Physical presence has been replaced by texting, voicemail, snapchats and video calls. Now we no longer have the need to spend time together. We have too much of each other. We end up having nothing more to say to each other.
7. We are a “wandering” generation, we cannot stay in one place for too long. We are all phobic about engagement. Just thinking about it scares us. We cannot imagine ourselves all our life with one person.
We are leaving. We despise permanence, as if it were the evil of the century. We like to think we are “different” from others. We like to think that we are not conforming to social norms.
8.We are a generation that calls themselves “s exually liberated” . We differentiate between s ex and love, at least we believe it. We are the s ex-then-breakup generation. We make love and decide if we are going to love this person or not.
S ex is easy; loyalty is less so . Lying down is the new way of getting drunk. We don’t do it because we love the person, but because we want to feel good. We need this temporary fullness. S ex outside the couple is no longer a taboo.
Romantic relationships are no longer simple. It’s about free relationships, improved friendships, transient relationships, blows of a night, no strings attached – we’ve chased all forms of exclusivity from our lives.
9. We are the pragmatic generation, which only works with logic. We no longer know how to love madly. We would not fly to a distant country to find the one we love. We break up, you know long distance relationships … We are too sensitive for love. Too sensitive for our own good.
10. We are a terrified generation – terrified of loving, terrified of engaging, terrified of falling, terrified of being hurt, terrified of being brokenhearted. We do not open to anyone, any more than we decide to love unconditionally.
We crouch behind these high walls that we have erected, in search of love but, we flee as soon as it appears. Suddenly, we can no longer “manage”. We don’t want to be vulnerable. We don’t want to reveal our soul to anyone. We are too on guard.
11. We no longer even know the value of a romantic relationship. We let go of the most wonderful people for these “other fish in the ocean”. Nothing is more sacred.
There is nothing we could not do in this world, and yet we are madly awkward when it comes to the game of love – one of the most basic instincts of Man. And this is called evolution.
