The Generational Inability to Properly Love By Khanyisile Sithole

Over the course of millions of years, humans have developed in ways that were previously thought impossible. Through our never-ending ability to adapt and change to increase our chances of survival, the population has recently reached a point where instead of acting to survive, we are acting to live. This has created an environment where our decisions are not solely based on whether it will sustain and develop our species, but instead on whether the decision will make us happy.

However, despite our progression in a multitude of areas in life, the one place we as a community have failed to do better in is our ability to romantically love. Regardless of our proven capabilities of changing the way we think to better our lives, I fully believe the one area we fail to improve in is love. Furthermore, through countless observations of my own generation and older ones, I have concluded that, as a whole, nobody has ever truly romantically loved.

This accusation may seem ludicrous – after all, don’t we all know what love is? Yet when you truly look at the world around you, all the lovers and happy couples, do you see love? No. Instead, you see a fabricated version of it. The false image of what connects humans is seeping into our existence like water does to clothes and ruining the possibility of truly bonding with somebody. The only reason our perception of love has become damp and disgusting is because we have never truly seen it.  

The first thing that needs clarification is the question of ‘what is romantic love?’ Love is a complicated mess; its different interpretations and the beliefs about it are intertwined to create an extremely detailed and delicate basket – one where you can easily see the good, the bad, and the ugly. To define love is to describe a vague topic for you will never truly encompass what the basket of love is. Even with the seemingly limitless number of words in the English Language, none of them will ever string together in the right way to accurately describe this intricate and perplexing connection between humans. Despite that, I shall do my best. Love is a bond that creates this sense of constant (not painful, but constant) desire to be around a particular person. Love creates a relationship between people that pulls them to display their affection in romantic gestures or acts. Most importantly, love is mutual and both people are more than content with each other and fail to build that sort of connection with other people whilst together with the person they love. 

 

Now that there is a general definition of what love is, you might be able to understand me better when I accuse a total population of roughly 117 billion people never truly loving. Let’s begin with the oldest generation where most of its people are still living: the Baby Boomers. 

In their defense, the concept of love was atrocious from the start. Baby Boomers were the product of an economic boom (especially in the United States) and most of their parents, though still conforming to the expectations of a married couple, got married because they had a fling and produced a child. The main problem with this is the affair part. See, a dalliance is lustful, not love. It fails to create that deep connection that is attributed to love. Instead, it is a shadow of what it so desperately reaches to be. Lust is like a moth – a deceitful bug that, in the process, pretends to be a bewitching butterfly but over time shows how ugly it is. Unfortunately for Baby Boomers, being born in a loveless marriage ruins your perception of love. And one of the biggest problems with how Baby Boomers rebelled is that they only defied what their parents said on the surface. Internally, they kept the same ideologies: love is a sharp knife that you must endure, regardless of the pain. Because of this, when Baby Boomers got married and had children, they stayed in their marriages irrespective of what their heart desired or just ‘separated’ but remained legally married (mainly because of the negativity regarding the topic of divorce).  

 

Is this the love we defined? No. 

Baby Boomers produced two generations – Generation X (Gen X) and Millennials. I shall begin by dissecting Gen X.  

Unfortunately, a major chunk of Gen X was born in the same conditions as Baby Boomers – in a loveless marriage. However, being born in these conditions along with the fact that Gen X are heavily rebellious children who question anything and everything should mean that they also questioned the perception of love at the time, right? They did. However, despite this, what they replaced the ‘archaic’ type of love with was something so upsettingly similar they may as well have done nothing at all. The marginally more acceptable things such as divorce and homosexuality does not take away from the fact that unwanted commitment, wrong choices and shaming people for their decisions was still an extremely common phenomenon. Ultimately, they suffered the same fate as their parents. My own parents are victim to this fate, eventually having to divorce because they realised they made the wrong choice. They didn’t actually love each other.  

 

Moving on to a generation that revolutionized the field of love, Millennials should have been the ones to get the concept of love correct. Surprisingly, they got it almost on the nose. Unsurprisingly, what they created was unattainable. See, what Millennials did was construct this unreachable type of love. They produced what is seen as today’s stereotypical, book-like love. Instead of engineering the aforementioned definition of love, they built a new, much more identifiable version that could be spotted in TV shows, movies and other forms of media. What is the main problem with this? They fed the whole world this façade. Millennials carefully crafted something that everybody would chase but nobody could have. It is absurd to pursue the same relationship that Nora and Charlie had in ‘Book Lovers’. You cannot rationally, or realistically, obtain the connection that Stella and Michael had in ‘The Kiss Quotient’. Yet Millennials spoon-fed millions of people into believing that they could find such unrealistic love and, subsequently, most of the couples that you see have been fooled into believing that they have caught what they were hunting; little do they know that instead of being a lion catching a gazelle, they only captured a mirage of what they intended to. 

Finally, I shall analyse Generation Z (Gen Z). Gen Z faces one major problem – it cannot, for the life of it, admit to doing anything similar to older generations. Gen Z has dubbed themselves ‘The Rebels’ and thus must avoid anything relating to people older than them unless they can pass it off as a modified version of the older, original thing. This borderline phobia of anything not created in this generation crosses over into the field of love, and the consequences of that are grave. Due to this constant desire to be different, we have become so intolerant of any construct that could seem to be a good idea, including the construct of love. I would not use the term ‘aromantic’ to describe this generation’s connection to love, but instead I would use the phrase ‘the death of romantic love’ to truly explain what is going on. Instead of believing that you can find the love I have defined and attempting to act on it, Gen Z turns around and finds the exact opposite of love: casual flings, ‘situation-ships’, anything except the deep connection you create when you love somebody. Instead of working on the perception of love to meet the definition so that the world can see it for the first time, Gen Z went against it all to kill the concept of love. Instead of realizing that love isn’t some outdated idea made to pin two people together forever, we abandoned in it in favour of fabricated feelings. What’s more, as far as my eyes can see, that is never going to change so long as we are addicted to defiance and rejection. 

Now can you see my perspective? Do you understand why I believe we, on the whole, have never truly romantically loved?  

Perhaps one day, people will finally understand what romantic love truly is. Perhaps one day, people will chase after it because they realise that romantic love is something they can obtain. Perhaps one day, I will be proven wrong, and people will emerge with a relationship that is true romantic love to show me that people can honestly love. Until then, I shall continuously say that there is a generational inability to properly love.