PSA: Take this with a grain of salt. I am after all, still in my adolescence.
I grew up on 90s and early 2000s romance movies and songs. I grew up watching people make grand declarations of love by standing outside your window with a boom box on their heads, Richard Gere hanging outside a limousine roof with a rose between his teeth (Pretty Woman, 1990), people running across an entire Bridge (because of traffic) because they just had to tell their person how much they love them. Even the simple things; people writing each other love letters, sharing a milkshake, writing each other poetry, sharing popcorn while watching a slasher film, that's the type of stuff I grew up watching.
I guess it's pretty easy to see how I grew up loving the art of romance. I am, to my core, a hopeless romantic. I love love; the idea of liking someone, getting to know them, and it just maybe working out forever is such a beautiful concept for me. However, and I don't mean to sound like everyone on twitter who says "today's generation is so lost", dating in my age group is often stifling, unfulfilling and so draining. Romance as an art form, as a love language, has ceased to exist. Instead, what we are stuck with is hookup culture, people who settle because they are afraid to be alone, "indoda must" discourse on twitter and situationships.
This all stems from the fact that at some point, I don't know when, people decided that they didn't have to put in effort if they liked someone. We decided as a collective that we aren't going to expect roses and chocolates and actual thoughfulness, we decided it was okay to get a good morning text every once in a while and a call here and there. We killed romance when we decided to drop our standards, and start settling for the bare minimum. Bare minimum then became effort, and now we are getting less than.
Social media, having access to anyone, anywhere at anytime, has made us comfortable. Nowadays, you don't have to climb a mountain (literally and figuratively) to be able to tell someone you like them. You can just send a text message, or you can comment hearts on their instagram post, that is apparently too much now, so you can just like their instagram story. Boring! Social media has created an illusion of connection. Now we have an entire generation of people who are so comfortable with the illusion of connection that they don't bother to form real connections with one another. When you add hookup culture to the mix, it's just a huge mess.
Access to anyone at any time has made people feel that they don't need to put in any effort into getting (and keeping) the person they want. Everyone is accepting of anything, everyone is going with the flow, everyone is quick to break up once their partner does one thing they don't like. Being romantic is about expressing love and dedication in a way that's intentional, unmistakable, and deeply affectionate. It involves dramatic or passionate gestures, devotion and dedication. The dating scene we have today lacks this devotion and dedication, it's about instant gratification and fleeting connection.
There are all these rules when it comes to dating; you can like someone but don't tell them, you need to wait a specific amount of time before replying to someone's text, you can't buy your girlfriend flowers too many times because she'll start to expect that treatment, you can't be vulnerable with the person you're having raw sex with, etc etc. It's the rules people willingly subscribe to when entering into relationships in our day and age. It's pretty clear that no one really wants this, we all, on some level or the other, crave romance, but we settle for these half-assed connections and call that love.
Upon writing this blog entry, I found a quote from a Holly Riordan who said: "Romance is dead, because we’ve let it die. We’re too worried about looking clingy and naggy and desperate that we stay quiet or drop subtle hints instead of asking for what we really want. We want to appear more laid-back than we actually are, so we keep our emotions bottled up. We think it’s cooler to hate on Valentine’s Day and on marriage and on love in general than to be open and honest about our feelings. We think it’s better to act emotionless."
I want better for us, for myself even. I mean we deserve better than flawed dating rules no one understands, we deserve better than weird dating standards, we deserve better than situationships and talking stages. I truly believe that the only solution to "Mjolo the Pandemic" is to bring back actual romance. Bring back Vuyiswa Msutwana pleading "Baby, marry me today" (White Wedding, 2009), bring back people putting actual effort into meaningful relationships, bring back romantic gestures. Romance, as an artform, as a love language, can be revived. However, the only way to truly bring it back is to decide, as a collective, to stop settling for nonsense.
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I've linked Holly's article below, for those who would like to read it further:
Beautiful piece.
Love it. Thank God someone spoke out for us, hopeless romanc