“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
I’m going to be the one to say it, I mean you’re so deep into creeping your ex’s Facebook profile that you’re in their cousin’s 2007 “Cottage Weekend” album, and you’d prefer to spend actual time and effort on creating a fake twitter account so you can follow your ex’s private profile before being caught dead following them after you broke up – we suck at love.
Somewhere between getting your braces on, going to your first college party, and right now, someone obliterated your heart. When someone really broke your heart you couldn’t help but think: “Wow, no more of that, no. No thank you. Return to sender. Refund. No. Done with that. Bye.” And then you probably went on, or tried to go on, a non-stop snatch parade to fill your emptiness when you were too sick of ice cream and listening to TSwift. Specifically, here’s why we suck at love:
Because we’re scared:
We run when things start to get serious because that gives us something to lose. Ask any 20-something what the scariest words in the English language are today and you’re likely to get: “student debt”, “rent is due” or “commitment.” We’ve become obsessed with the idea of being the bad guy. Nobody wants to be the damsel in distress; no one puts themselves out there to be hurt because we need to be in control. Having our heart crushed or stomped on is an experience one tries to limit to as few experiences as possible. In the process, we harden our heart and become the crusher and breaker of others because somewhere we decided that is a feeling we can handle.
Because we’re self-seeking:
Most people that are going to read this are used to getting what they want. Millenials are convinced that people born in the 90’s are entitled to everything this world can and will offer to them. We’re determined in a deprecating way, we want to succeed and we want to get to the top, but we don’t want someone with us on the way. We’ve become obsessed with leaving our mark on the world and refuse to let anyone ”get in our way”, there’s nothing wrong with having goals and being tenacious, but those qualities have unknowingly grown us to be single-minded and selfish.
Because we never know what we want:
How are we supposed to know what we want when we can get anything? There’s a lot of instant gratification in the world we live in, if you want most things, you can pretty much get them on the Internet. Love is always going to take a bunch of time. You can’t download love, or order it with 2-day express shipping. The thing with getting anything we want, whenever we want it, is that it gets old really quickly. Anything worth having takes a lot of time to get and it’s time you should want to spend it on love.
Because we keep record of wrongs:
Point blank: we compare everyone to our exes. We do this thing where we apply every past relationship partners good and bad qualities to any current or potential relationship partner. By doing this, we are already expecting too much of someone who doesn’t know they’re in a competition with your ex. How can someone possibly compete with a person that you’ve already fallen in love with? Well, they can’t, so they fall short and they always will.
Because we don’t want to be alone:
We don’t like change and we don’t like endings. We are inherently bad at letting go if that’s not what we want to do. Break-ups force us to get rid of a feeling or a person we’re not prepared to say goodbye to and it hurts. Feelings suck, right? That’s why we’ve constructed a hook-up culture to avoid them, isn’t it? We committed to a non-committal lifestyle that has shiny promises of never getting your feelings hurt because feelings will never be involved. As much as we make it seem that we’re okay with being alone, and staying alone, none of us have grown up with a “dying alone” ideal, so what do we do? We find people we’re willing to talk to in our free time, but we’re not looking for people we’re willing to free our time for.
Because we think everyone is replaceable:
We love to have options and we have plenty. With our technology, some people are just a swipe away. It’s okay to be selective and you shouldn’t allow everyone the privilege of getting to know you. Yet it’s an unfortunate truth that we’ve convinced ourselves to degrade others by lumping them into groups. What we like in someone we guarantee ourselves we can find in someone else; we don’t want to make anyone seem too special to us because therein lies attachment. In actuality we’re cheating ourselves out of finding anyone valuable by believing everyone is easily disposable. We live in a “throwaway” culture, where if something breaks, we get a new one. We’ve disastrously applied this mentality to our relationships, which is an extremely unhealthy and unnatural way in dealing with loss.
Because we’ve never seen it:
We are incredibly lucky to live in such an accessible world, especially as a North American. The rotten thing about knowing what’s out there is exactly that: knowing what’s out there. We are bombarded with hateful images of the world that surrounds us; we don’t get to hide from the evil in the world because we see it every day. Another unfortunate remark to make is that a lot of 20-somethings grew up in a loveless household, where divorce was a much more likely outcome than a long, happy and faithful marriage. How are we supposed to emulate something, or know what something is, if we’re not sure it exists?
Regrettably, there are many other reasons why we suck at love. I mean we listen to too much John Mayer, we think “likes” on Instagram translate to genuine likeness, we think not responding to a text is a break-up, we confuse lust for love and vice-versa and someone actually took the time to create Tinder. We live in a society going backwards here, we’re trying so hard not to be in love that we forgot what it was all about. The thing is, the harder we try to isolate ourselves to the pain, the more vulnerable we are to it.
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