Why Does Love Last Less Today?
My grandparents, a little joking and a little really heartbroken, always tell me that, these days, love is struggling to survive. Home services and instant things triumph. Uncertain and slow investments scare; moreover, it doesn’t take many years to decide to go back from places we passed quickly, without having had time to really get to know them.
In fact, the relatively young couples who have accumulated so many years together are an endangered species. Younger people say that before you can find true love, you have to have experienced casual love. What they don’t know is that, as they grow up, they accumulate fixations and make life more and more complicated for Cupid.
As we age we not only accumulate wrinkles, but also cats to peel; in the meantime, we lose patience. Patience is not affected by unconditional loves, such as those that come from the family, but by those loves that are not yet born or that blossom very slowly. Because intimacy needs space and affection.
Dark circles are not attractive
With some exceptions, if a young person wants to live outside the home and meet the expenses related to his independence, he will have to work long hours. Except for a few specific jobs, the price per hour is low, the rents are high, electricity and heating are a luxury and the holidays … Holidays ?!
This causes worries to increase, the hours of sleep are reduced and leads us to transform the time to devote to our relationships into short voice messages or text messages. This can take a while, the time of initial inertia, until two people get out of bed as if they were two strangers. With the same indifference, the same detachment.
We live more years than ever before, but we are attractive for less. We have Botox available, but not happiness. The one that generates smiles and that nourishes the generosity that produces others. We give a certain image of ourselves on social networks and live with another image that only vaguely resembles the one published, because we must admit that when we “posted” the photo we were already deceiving others.
Love in hard times
This is how love has to make a survival test, because it has to go along with this rhythm of life imposed by society. He suffers with the new channels of communication, because an “I love you” followed by an emoticon will never be the same as that spoken, with a beautiful bouquet of flowers and an intense look. A walk in the park to eat dried fruit and express your hopes will never resemble a Skype dinner, with the constant fear that the line might drop.
If the means by which we deal with love have deteriorated, it is natural that love is also more fragile, that it has less resistance and that it receives more “blows”.
We give up earlier because we expect the other to do so too. We pack our bags before closing the relationship because we have too many resources to deposit them on an unlikely promise. We are more aware than ever of the mortality of love and the consequences of its failure.
We don’t give ourselves the opportunity to try, because we can’t afford to upset our routine if by any chance something goes wrong. Such a bewildering event would not be admissible.
Reality is too unstable to believe that an attractive stranger carries on the body that we will one day remember.
For this reason, loving nowadays is complicated. The obstacles are much greater than before, despite the fact that in the past lovers could not be alone or were censored for cuddling in public. We killed one monster to create another more powerful and more disturbing one. We may have evolved in many ways, but these times are tougher than ever for love.
