As such, my definition of the word "romance" is as follows:
romance - Spending obscene amounts of time and money and thought on a single person in the hopes that they will fornicate with you frequently and someday offer or accept your offer to dedicate their lives to you at some point. See: "peacocking."We'll use a couple from my favorite show when I was younger, Friends, as an example for the metaphor I'm trying to convey here. During the first season of the show, we are introduced to the six twentysomething members of "the gang," comprised of four people that don't really matter for the purposes of this example and a couple named Ross and Rachel.
Aside #1: I know for a fact that approximately half of you reading this are rolling your eyes at me right now, wondering if you should continue reading this if I'm really going to use Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer's fictitious relationship as a metaphor for modern romance. Well, shut the fuck up and keep reading.
During the second season of the show, the two of these start dating after it is revealed in the first season that Ross has secretly been in love with Rachel since the two were in high school together. Now that you know that adorable fact that lead to the two of them simply dating, let me break down their relationship for you over the course of the ten seasons the show ran for (spoiler alert!):
Season 1: Rachel finds out Ross is in love with her.
Season 2: Rachel confronts Ross and says she loves him too. They begin dating.
Season 3: Ross and Rachel go "on a break" and Ross sleeps with another woman. They break up.
Season 4: Ross tries to marry a woman named Emily, but says Rachel's name at the altar.
Season 5: ...nothing really happens other than some residual emotional shit from the above, and the below happening as the season closer.
Season 6: Ross and Rachel are married after a drunken night in Vegas. They get divorced and break up.
Season 7: Rachel becomes pregnant with Ross' baby. Ross nearly proposes. The two decide to not reconcile.
Season 8: Ross and Rachel move in together, still not reconciled.
Season 9: Rachel moves out and in with another "friend," Joey. The two share a romance as Ross dates Joey's ex.
Season 10: Rachel and Joey break up, around the same time Ross becomes single. The series ends with the two compromising for one another and confessing their love, once again. The series ends assuming they live happily ever after.
What I'm getting at is, these two define the term "torrid love affair." Over the course of ten years (not including the decade or so between when the two met in high school and when the series begins), they are together for just under three years total. Yet they chased after each other endlessly, caught up in the idea of a life with each other despite quite a few bumps in the road. Pretty cute stuff, huh?
Given that this was my favorite show for many years during some emotionally influential periods in my life, it's understandable why I am conditioned to do as Rachel and Ross do and believe that true love does exist, and may come around for a second time if it's "meant to be." Through years of trial and error in relationships of my own, I've realized that these indirect claims made by Friends are mostly full of shit.
Aside #2: SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKER. But seriously, I still love that show.
It's not that I don't believe that love exists (because I do), but I do not believe that anything, including who you end up with, is "meant to be." I'm not meaning to squash the hopes of all of the people reading this that believe that soulmates exist in some capacity, but it is a statistical improbability (near impossibility) that you will end up with the single person out of the roughly 1-2 billion you could reasonably be with that will be the absolute perfect person for you. I don't care if you think it's God or the universe that inspires true love in people brings couples together that need to be together, the chances of it are astronomical and I don't believe that it is something that could theoretically happen millions upon millions of times a year.
Aside #3: I brought this point up at a gathering once, and some allegedly annoyingly religious girl said "If it's God's will, they'll end up together because they'll be guided by His hand." I said "God must be a shitty matchmaker, given the divorce rate nowadays." She politely shut her mouth and impolitely glared at me for several minutes.
But, like I said, I do believe in love in a romantic capacity. I've seen too much proof of it in my life to not believe that it really does exist, as well as felt it for myself. It's just that my generation (and likely the generations before and after mine) are so conditioned by media and outside influences in general when it comes to our romantic capabilities that we realize that what I said above is entirely true; whether we admit it or not. We make it easier to swallow by maintaining the idiom that there are "plenty of fish in the sea," and telling ourselves that there is always someone out there that will be a better fit than our former (or current) mate.
This is not helped by our species' recent technology boom, either. Suddenly, we are connected to a larger number of people than we ever have been before, thus increasing our chances of finding that "perfect person" we so desire to be with. Temptation runs rampant in our modern age, because we simply can't be satisfied with what we have with the connections we have available to us.
Of course, things haven't always been this way. Remember the first time you read Romeo & Juliet as a teenager, and were struck by how the whirlwind love affair the two titular characters share is so short-lived, yet so powerful? Let's do what we did for Ross and Rachel earlier and break down Romeo and Juliet's relationship, split into the play's five acts:
Act 1: Romeo sees Juliet for the first time at a party. The two instantly fall in love, despite the fact that their families are feuding. On his way home from the party, Romeo stops by Juliet's window and the two agree to marry the next day.
Act 2: Romeo and Juliet are married.
Act 3: Juliet's angry cousin kills Romeo's cocky best friend, Romeo kills him in revenge. He is banished for murder and nearly kills himself when he thinks he will never see Juliet again.
Act 4: Juliet's father arranges for her to marry someone else, all while Juliet is planning on running away with Romeo. They hatch a plan that I (hopefully) don't need to go into the details of.
Act 5: Due to a simple case of bad timing, Romeo believes Juliet is dead and kills himself out of despair. Juliet wakes up and finds Romeo dead, and does the same. Fin.
This all happens over the course of five days, and happened because two people saw each other across a crowded room one time. In the 400 years since this story was written, we've gone from the average amount of time it takes for two fictitious people to realize they want to spend the rest of their lives together being around fifteen seconds to TEN FUCKING YEARS. That is a massive, massive leap, and it's incredibly upsetting to me that these two (admittedly extreme) situations can be taken as examples of their respective generation's relationship habits. The idea of falling in love at first sight is a ridiculous prospect, as is going through a terribly revealing rollercoaster of a situation with someone you plan on settling down with forever. Neither situation seems all too plausible to me.
Aside #4: I know this is a huge generalization to be making about two completely different generations of human beings, but for the sake of my argument I think both of them can take the proverbial bullet for this one.
That's not to say we haven't experienced a happy medium at some point. I've noticed over the last few years that couples that come from the connected, yet not quite interconnected, era that lasted from approximately 1940 until 1985 generally end up staying together for a longer period of time. I think that this is because they were born in what I believe to be the "golden age" of technology when it came to what capacity you could speak with your significant other in before you were married.
For instance, back in 1597 when Romeo & Juliet was published, it was not uncommon to have arranged marriages (as Juliet's father demonstrates in act 4). The two protagonists didn't know each other, but fell in love with a glance. Clearly this was a generation that was fine with jumping the gun when it came to huge life decisions. On Friends, it took Ross and Rachel ten years of being an off and on couple to realize they wanted to be together. They got to know each other through years and years of conversation and sleeping around with other people and living together and even having a child together. Clearly they were ridiculously indecisive when it's obvious that they should have been together by season 7 or 8.
Aside #5: I may or may not have some residual feelings left over concerning Ross and Rachel's relationship in the last three seasons of Friends.
Even worse, now with the advent of the smart phone and application of social networking to our daily lives, we are able to be constantly connected to the person we are in a relationship, often forcing stilted conversation because we merely have the capability to do so. Some people become so overloaded with information about their significant others that their flaws are found out too soon, before they are able to take the time to appreciate the person for having them. With this comes resentment, and soon the unhappy party begins looking for someone else without said flaw.
Aside #6: Again, not really making a generalization, more of an observation this time. Sue me.
I believe that this aforementioned sweet spot is a pretty good couple of decades, however. Imagine being young and in a relationship in 1968, for instance. Calling the person's house, hoping they were home. Going out on dates every weekend, so you have something to look forward to during the week. Actually getting to know the person because you want to get to know them, not because you feel obligated to.
Also - try to wrap your head around this - getting married before you know every last minuscule detail about someone's personality and habits. I know that sounds insane, since we are all now obsessed with finding flaws in each other so that we can try and love someone better, but to me the idea of going into a lifetime commitment with someone that I still don't know some things about makes me excited to discover those things. Sure, not all of those things may be appealing, but what this generation also fails to realize is that you should love someone because of their flaws, not in spite of them.
The point I'm trying to make here is that out of the billions on Earth, the person you end up with may not be the most perfect person for you, but they should definitely be the most perfect person to you. Even if they fart in their sleep regularly.
Albums that I listened to while writing this:
Moms - Menomena
Dog Problems - The Format
Mantis Preying - Alvin Band
Amount of drugs I was on while writing this:
Two bowls of marijuana, smoked via bong.
One bowl of marijuana, smoked via pipe (strain for both: Yeti).
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