I posted to my Facebook the other day that “I will fall in love when a man calls me instead of texting, and gifts a book instead of flowers”. It seems that dating these days has turned into a cliché where people don’t really connect anymore. I was chatting with my ex boyfriend in our long 4 hour drive home from Tahoe, and he and I had different views on love (it’s no wonder things didn’t work out with us). He believes in soul mates, and I believe that we choose our partners and fight to make it work. What we agreed on is that our generation does not work hard enough in relationships and we want the instant gratification that we can get with food and technology, but not from other human beings.
Because I have been thinking about this I recently found and read two articles about dating in our new technology centered world. Abra Cohen, a freelance writer for the Huffington post, has an interesting view in her article “Modern Dating, Decoded” about how we have become dependent on technology for dating interactions. We text instead of call, check our phones constantly, and look to have meaningless relationships, but we are not capable of actually doing that. In the end, we all need the affection and physical closeness that we think we don’t want or need.
Ramona Pringle, host of ridgitallife and faculty at Ryerson University, actually touches on the same idea that we think we do not need other people to be happy in her article “Breaking ‘the Rules’: Finding Love in the Digital Age.” She says that “in many ways we were raised to be single. Our generation was taught that independence was the gold standard” As an economist, the gold standard is actually the opposite of independence (it’s giving up your ability to control monetary policy in the country), but I get what she means. We have been taught to be independent, and to not depend on anyone else for our wellbeing or happiness. The problem with this is that we do need others to e happy. We were made to have physical closeness with other humans.
The question is, how do we move forward from here? How do we learn how to be co-dependent again? How do we learn to put effort into relationships? What needs to happen in society to make marriages work again? Or do we abandon the idea altogether? How do I teach my daughter to love so that she does not end up facing a future of being alone?