This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at UNT chapter.
Watching movies like The Notebook, Love Jones, and Titanic gives us a view of how society was back then. Not just the love, but the overall realness and raw emotion people had. When you take a second to think about it, the decline of embracing emotions and seeking real love happened suddenly. One moment marriage is the overall end goal of relationships, the next just getting past the talking stage is an accomplishment. How did we become a generation that glorifies not caring? Why did we turn the beauty of being carefree into the plague of hiding our emotions?
The Emotionless:
“Act like you don’t care” is a common piece of advice passed around by our generation. We encourage each other to put on this robotic mask when faced with problems. Don’t get me wrong, the strategy of being careful with your emotions is smart. It becomes a problem when we start bottling our emotions and missing out on things because we didn’t show we cared. So many opportunities, relationships, friendships, and overall everyday interactions are ruined by the emotionless trend. Emotions are beautiful and powerful when embraced. Realizing or continuing to ignore this could make or break our future as a society.
The Loveless:
As we get deeper into adulthood stories of real love become harder to find. In the past stories of relationships and marriage received genuine congratulations, but now they’re usually greeted by a slick comment about how it won’t last. The word love itself is watered down and misused so much by this generation. I believe our generation let love go missing, maybe because we don’t really know what love is anymore. It seems as though most people’s dreams of real love were shattered in some way and as a result our generation created concepts like “situationships” and “the talking stage” in order to get a taste of “love” while minimizing the risk of getting hurt. To many of us the allure of being able to play relationship with no feelings attached sounds so convincing until we’re three months in and we finally realize things are going nowhere. In the end, no matter how hard we try to supplement love with these extra terms; nothing will truly match the feeling that real love gives.
Years from now, people will look at our generation and study how we shaped the world. Every generation is known for something, whether it’s their work ethic in the face of tough times or their overall angst towards the world. We have the chance to change the world and create our own standard of how we should treat each other. Do we really want to be known as the generation that ruined the signifcance of real love and emotion?