With Valentine’s Day being yesterday, it made me wonder if there is something in the DNA of Generation Y—-fundamentally altered by being able to video chat with someone around the globe in five seconds—-that made them experience love any differently than generations past. Is emailing or Facebook or even sexting really that different than love letters or, before them, sexy cave drawings?
Well, yes. For one thing, they don’t take nearly as long, and I can imagine it must have sucked to send your sweetheart a sexy letter a hundred years ago and not know if you’ll ever get a reply. Either because she died of tuberculosis in between correspondence or the postman simply got drunk and never delivered her followup.
Today’s daters look almost spoiled by comparison to the Romeo and Juliet days of having to actually sit down, put pen to paper, and fill up a few paragraphs (not entirely unlike writing this feature). Now you can write “u ht, ltz fuk” and see what happens.
Now women reading this might say “I would prefer the old days when a guy was actually a gentlemen,” but that’s a Jane Austin pipe dream. The old-time notion that every guy was a standup sort when people were just as lousy then, perhaps worse, than they are today, and women had enough rights that a “date” couldn’t end in a rape (they didn’t) that was not only legal but would get the woman in trouble for reporting it. [The Middle-East is still playing catch-up on changing these attitudes.]
The dynamics of everything have changed in the last few years. Women are more similar to men than they ever have been in human history, and technology has opened up an actual ocean of choices. Remember the old line “There’s plenty of fish in the sea?” Well now you can meet them on the internet.
And that’s probably the biggest difference: volume. The changes in the way we communicate—-both how and with what device, the fact that we now use a device period—-mean that men don’t have to put two hours and countless months into “courting” a woman with written letters, and women don’t have to wait to be in an arranged marriage they aren’t excited about, they can do the courting.
As with business (and Valentine’s Day card companies can tell you love is business), the increase in the volume of potential suitors increases the quality so that dating is a little more accurate than picking one of three “prospects” your parents picked. [India is still playing catch-up on this.] Sometimes the quantity of competitors brings out a dark side when people have so many choices they can’t stop choosing even when they’re married—-note the sky-high divorce rate which is directly attributed to the “grass is greener over there” modern attitude that lets people endlessly update everything from their cell phones to their spouses—-but I think more often than not it lets people wind up with who they really should be with.