We notice there are so many people failing at love every chance that they get. You have to console your best friend numerous times after she gets her heart broken or you have to convince your boy there is someone else better out there… but all we are doing is avoiding what is truly right in front of us. Today, in the 21st century, why have we forgotten how to love and what love actually is?
We think of love as something that should come easily. Love can be easy, it’s true, but our idea of “easy” is not having to invest our time into making a relationship work because we rarely have to invest our time in life. We want everything to come easily. We might not think that we are quitters when it comes to love, but unfortunately, we are. All it takes is a single challenge to frustrate us and make us give up. We don’t let our love grow; we let it go because we compare it to what social media or the internet supplies us with. We are taught our fears are a way to escape and avoid actually working to bond and form a connection with another person. Then, we erase the chances of forming a relationship because we continue to play games and bask in our own fears. Both people end up losing. We want a relationship without the work or risks involved in a real one. We want the hand-holding for a moment, we want the comfort for a moment, we want the affection for a moment, we want the attention for a moment, but we don’t want the work that is required to build a real relationship.
Ultimately, we live our lives just for that moment without really working towards a clear goal. It is not love we’re looking for; it’s the chase and the thrill of life for that moment. So many of us want someone to Netflix and chill with but the moment someone opens up and shows us vulnerability and their deepest secrets, we run away. Or we say we aren’t ready because…
We look for instant gratification in everything we do. We are so used to it that it effortlessly plays into our love lives. We just have to ask Siri, plug in our address to a GPS, open up a dating app, post on social media, click one button to have our car parallel park for us, listen to that song we have in our mind by one click on iTunes, tell Alexa to order us milk, use our thumbprints to pass security in the airport, not go to the grocery store because now it can be delivered to your door … We live a life in which human interaction is taken out and we are gratified in an instant. We expect the same thing in our love lives so we get easily distracted.
Now we believe in “having options” when in reality this is just a bandage to ignore having to do any real work. We’d rather spend an hour each day with a hundred people via social media than spend a day with one. We meet people but we avoid getting to know who they truly are. We find a flaw and say it won’t work instead of encouraging a partnership to bring out the best in that one person. We want them to be perfect because we can be perfect with a tap of a finger on an app.
In modern relationships, we might date a lot of people but rarely give them a real chance. We’re a generation in which sex is easy. We love to “hook up” because we want to feel good. Sex comes easily but loyalty doesn’t. Whatever happened to the thrill in the chase and loving deeper? We are a generation living based on fear of love. We are fearful of falling in love and getting hurt, commitment, being with one person, not being good enough, or getting our hearts broken. We blame someone else for their shortcomings when we need to realize that these are walls we created ourselves. The thought of bearing our soul to someone frightens us and we look at vulnerability as a weakness, so we put up this wall. Vulnerability deeply frightens us, but what we need to recognize is the thing that we truly want…
The things that we deeply desire, the things that are generally fulfilling, all require patience, work, energy, compassion, self-love, honesty, time, and trust. The challenge is that we want to be with someone who makes us happy when we haven’t found how to make ourselves truly happy. The easy way out is stating we don’t want a relationship… but at the end of the day we actually really, really do. When we stop letting the superficial and instant gratification feelings interfere with what we really want, we will experience a breakthrough.
I encourage you to take a step back and look at the ways that you are not making an effort to be the best version of you. What are you scared of and what might be holding you back?
Love and relationships are not always taught to us hence we are lost when we come into our adulthood. We end up doing the wrong things or adapting to how society portrays modern relationships, but that’s not the answer. The answer is to look inside and make sure you are being honest with yourself. Allow yourself to be honest and become the best version of yourself that you can be. Pay attention to your behaviors and always work towards self-improvement. Knowing how to love is different than understanding how to love. When you have the true understanding of love, you can start to plant the seed for the tree to finally blossom into something spectacular.
The root of that tree starts with you.
So, let me ask you this.
Can you be your true self?
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