Opinion: What Happened to Love?

I miss the old kind of love. The relationships that were based on real love. Connecting in person and learning about the person gradually. When couples would do cute stuff for each other and go above and beyond to make their relationship special. However, today people fall in “love” too quickly, but it’s not real love.

Growing up in the 2000s-2010s was a blessing. My favorite artists were all artists who sang about love, Bruno Mars, Katy Perry, Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande, Meghan Trainor, and many more. Bruno Mars released his two best albums in 2010 and 2014, Unorthodox Jukebox and Doo-Wops & Hooligans. Ed Sheeran released his album Divide a little later in 2017. This was prime time.

These albums were overfilled with heartfelt songs about love and what being in love feels like. I was around the age of six when these albums were out and being played over the radio and on speakers in malls, and on the side, I would be watching Disney princess movies.

Songs today are more about the physical qualities of relationships like sexual pleasure. Where is the romance? Most songs also talk about loss, heartbreaks, drugs, and pain. Listening to music that has negative meanings to them impacts us and the way we think. How can we believe in love when most songs playing on the radio today are about breakups? It makes me think, “why would I ever fall in love if I will end up breaking up with them anyway?”

I held high expectations for my future and the future “prince” I would find, but standards have been lowered to rock bottom. I’ve been thinking, maybe I’ve just grown up and see the world differently now. But, no. After the 2020 pandemic is when everything plummeted for all.

Today, we see a stream of online opinions about how love is supposed to be, so we are brainwashed to think that the reasons others catch feelings are the same as ours. It’s love that is formed online, an impersonal robotic kind of love. Love that is formed by snapping a picture of your face multiple times a day for multiple weeks to save a streak, and if that streak is lost (if they don’t send a picture for more than twenty-four hours) then you assume that it’s over. Now, you add someone on Snapchat based on if their Bitmoji looks presentable, but if their looks don’t match up with your expectations, then they get blocked or unfriended.

Technology turned into our lives and our escape from reality. Being stuck and isolated from our friends took a toll on our physical and mental health. When we returned back to school and work, masks made showing facial expressions harder, so we got used to not reading people’s emotions. Coming back to reality after social distancing made things awkward and hard to get used to. Our generation is more insecure, more anti-social, and especially more robotic than ever before.

Since we were isolated for so long, we forgot that people were people and not just online robots. We started looking at people for their physical qualities that we found attractive rather than for their internal qualities that came from their hearts. But who are we to blame? For two years we didn’t have that physical interaction with others and the screen in our hands didn’t look beyond the people on our phones.

During the pandemic dating apps also became extremely popular. 323 million people all over the world use online dating apps. When the global pandemic began in March 2020, Dating.com reported that dating on their site was up 82 percent. Meeting people online rather than in-person was the new normal. It is superficial and not real “love”.

On apps such as TikTok, words were being made through the pandemic to put a name to certain things. Most words were negatively used to describe people and some are still being used around daily. These terms made from technology are ruining romance.

Now, if you were ever to hear a song about love or someone doing something nice for a person they might like they would be called a “simp“. Now, what is a “simp”? A simp is slang for a person (typically a man) who is desperate for the attention and affection of someone else (typically a woman)”, according to Urban Dictionary. A simp is seen as a person who is “soft” and “too nice”, but are they “too nice” or are they just being caring?

I’m not saying that love doesn’t exist today. Love is definitely real and it’s a very nice and beautiful thing. I just don’t like where this generation’s view of romance has come to. I still have the same dreams I had as a kid, like wanting a future fairytale. This generation is less romantic than the last, and as the years go on I’m nervous that love will slowly disappear.