"It's Complicated"
It's the tapas bars I remember the most from my trip to Spain in July. Every evening, no earlier than nine pm, after the sun had set but before the nightclub doors opened, Spaniards ritualistically strolled into tapas joints to unwind together after work. Locals still suited in work attire chatted jubilantly at the bar ledge while cradling short glasses of amber-colored beer. Couples and small groups shared intimate conversation at clustered, quaint tables.
I couldn't help but observe the interactions of young people while frequenting the bars. What I saw: young people exchanging kisses on checks and affectionate hugs. Young people unafraid of engaging in intense eye contact. I watched people gaze attentively at each other throughout an entire meal, unlike the compulsive iPhone and Blackberry checking that I routinely witness here in the States. Young people seemed unabashed to be romantic and express love. Affection was celebrated, not awkward.
What was clear to me is that young people in Spain were infinitely more comfortable with spatial and intimate "closeness" in comparison to young Americans. Here in the U.S, young people seem cynical about love and scared of affection.
"For [young people], love is for the naive, the weak, the hopeless romantic," writes cultural critic bell hooks in All About Love.
In All About Love, hooks quotes author Harold Kushner, who writes, "I am afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid of love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person...I am afraid they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment."
Kushner's concern couldn't be more on point. We--both young people and the media--perpetuate this trend of increasingly distant relationships, romantic or not.
When I returned from Spain, the film 500 Days of Summer was just released in theaters. The film was a summer blockbuster hit, especially among young people. 500 Days of Summer depicts the story of a boy named Tom who meets girl named Summer. Their story is not a love story, we quickly learn.
Tom and Summer's love story is complicated, unsurprisingly. Tom is infatuated with Summer, but he's too afraid to ask her out. Summer finds Tom cute and endearing, so she dates him. But, like most twentysomethings, Summer is whimsical, non-committal and not looking for anything serious. She retreats, afraid of emotional investment in the relationship, and while this frustrates Tom, he suppresses this feeling because he’s too afraid to loose her.
"I think relationships are messy and people’s feelings get hurt. Who needs it?" says Summer to Tom.
The complications of Tom and Summer's “un-love story” epitomizes the commonly practiced modern young adulthood quasi-relationship. For starters, their relationship was neither "official" nor very romantic. It’s unclear whether they were dating or in a relationship; for most of the film, they were stuck somewhere in the middle.
Tom and Summer's situation is a dime a dozen these days. Young people in the U.S, across all racial and ethnic groups, seem perpetually stuck in this amorphous, undefined quasi-romantic relationships which fade away before they ever really started.
It worries me that films like 500 Days of Summer are the cinematic anthem for progressive young people today. Pop culture fetishes label-less, dysfunctional “non-relationship” couples like Tom and Summer, and as a result, young people misguidedly believe it is outdated to admit we care about someone we’re seeing, especially within the parameters of casual dating.
In a New York Times Modern Love essay titled Want To Be My Boyfriend? Please Define, Marguerite Fields, a student at Marlboro College, explores the challenge of distinguishing dating versus hooking up versus seeing someone. She writes, “I still want to believe that two people can meet and like each other well enough to stay together exclusively, without the introduction of some 1960s rhetoric about free love or other noncommittal slogans. But noncommittal is what we’re all about.”
In a NPR segment on sex without intimacy that aired in June, 25-year-old Elizabeth Welsh is quoted, saying, “Going out on a date is a sort of ironic, obsolete type of thing. Going out on a date to dinner and a movie? It's so cliché — isn't that funny?"
In that same NPR segment, 25-year-old Mary Wilkerson shares that she hadn’t found much intimacy with the men she’d encountered in her twenties, especially those in New York City, where she found people seemed even more emotionally detached.
"For many of us, the requisite vulnerability and exposure that comes from being really intimate with someone in a committed sense is kind of threatening,” said Wilkerson.
She added, “the thought of being in love with someone is the most terrifying thing.”
I, too, had a "Tom and Summer" experience recently. In the spring, I dated a nice man for a few months. At the time, we hung out a lot. Since he was planning to move away in the fall, we knew our paths would diverge eventually. We wavered between “seeing each other” and “dating.” I was perpetually confused about “what we were,” but of course I pretended I wasn’t.
One day, in June, while we strolling back from getting ice cream, he turned to me and said, “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.” After a second, or two, I glanced at him, put on my poker face, and nodded nonchalantly, “okay.”
He was cordial and apologetic, and said he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I responded with a confident shrug and assured him I was just fine.
Of course, I wasn’t. I was surprised, mostly. But I didn't ask any questions, nor did I probe for an explanation. We still had five more blocks to walk, so I changed the subject to inquire about a book I recently lent him. Less than ten minutes later, when we reached the “T” stop where he was to turn left for his apartment and I was to turn right, it was a polite “goodbye and good luck” and by the time I reached my apartment door, it felt like the brief courtship had never happened to begin with.
What bothers me is not that we parted ways, but rather, that I acted in accordance to the ideology that “not-quite-a-relationship” situations don’t warrant explanations or upfront communication. I didn’t have the courage to ask him why he had suddenly changed his mind; I feared appearing too emotionally involved in a situation that never had long-term potential to begin with.
What is also complicated is how young people get into this sort-of dating situation to begin with. It seems hard to believe, but most of the men who pursued me throughout the last five years have somehow utilized online communication in the pursuit, whether that's e-mail, Facebook, or whatnot. This isn’t because social media is replacing face-to-face interaction. Rather, e-communication tools like Facebook and e-mail are non-threatening media which allow us to casually gauge each others’ interest, all while keeping our guard up behind computer screens. Technology allows us to keep space, physically and figuratively, between ourselves and the individuals we’re interested in pursuing. As technology increasingly permeates our lives, will we continue to half-heartedly pursue each other online?
In a review of Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, Ann Friedman, an editor at Feministing.com, writes the definitive conclusion of this book is that casual college hookups have created a generation of young women who don’t care about love.
I doubt this is true. Women, whether they hook up or not, aren’t apathetic towards love. I think women and men still want to love and be loved, at some point in their adult years.
But while we might care about love, that doesn't mean we don't fear love, perhaps because we've normalized not loving each other--especially in a romantic sense. Surely, this decorum of non-committal dating culture perpetuates our fear of love and emotional involvement.
Then again, maybe my hunch is off. Maybe I should post something on Facebook about all this and see who comments.
I couldn't help but observe the interactions of young people while frequenting the bars. What I saw: young people exchanging kisses on checks and affectionate hugs. Young people unafraid of engaging in intense eye contact. I watched people gaze attentively at each other throughout an entire meal, unlike the compulsive iPhone and Blackberry checking that I routinely witness here in the States. Young people seemed unabashed to be romantic and express love. Affection was celebrated, not awkward.
What was clear to me is that young people in Spain were infinitely more comfortable with spatial and intimate "closeness" in comparison to young Americans. Here in the U.S, young people seem cynical about love and scared of affection.
"For [young people], love is for the naive, the weak, the hopeless romantic," writes cultural critic bell hooks in All About Love.
In All About Love, hooks quotes author Harold Kushner, who writes, "I am afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid of love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person...I am afraid they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment."
Kushner's concern couldn't be more on point. We--both young people and the media--perpetuate this trend of increasingly distant relationships, romantic or not.
When I returned from Spain, the film 500 Days of Summer was just released in theaters. The film was a summer blockbuster hit, especially among young people. 500 Days of Summer depicts the story of a boy named Tom who meets girl named Summer. Their story is not a love story, we quickly learn.
Tom and Summer's love story is complicated, unsurprisingly. Tom is infatuated with Summer, but he's too afraid to ask her out. Summer finds Tom cute and endearing, so she dates him. But, like most twentysomethings, Summer is whimsical, non-committal and not looking for anything serious. She retreats, afraid of emotional investment in the relationship, and while this frustrates Tom, he suppresses this feeling because he’s too afraid to loose her.
"I think relationships are messy and people’s feelings get hurt. Who needs it?" says Summer to Tom.
The complications of Tom and Summer's “un-love story” epitomizes the commonly practiced modern young adulthood quasi-relationship. For starters, their relationship was neither "official" nor very romantic. It’s unclear whether they were dating or in a relationship; for most of the film, they were stuck somewhere in the middle.
Tom and Summer's situation is a dime a dozen these days. Young people in the U.S, across all racial and ethnic groups, seem perpetually stuck in this amorphous, undefined quasi-romantic relationships which fade away before they ever really started.
It worries me that films like 500 Days of Summer are the cinematic anthem for progressive young people today. Pop culture fetishes label-less, dysfunctional “non-relationship” couples like Tom and Summer, and as a result, young people misguidedly believe it is outdated to admit we care about someone we’re seeing, especially within the parameters of casual dating.
In a New York Times Modern Love essay titled Want To Be My Boyfriend? Please Define, Marguerite Fields, a student at Marlboro College, explores the challenge of distinguishing dating versus hooking up versus seeing someone. She writes, “I still want to believe that two people can meet and like each other well enough to stay together exclusively, without the introduction of some 1960s rhetoric about free love or other noncommittal slogans. But noncommittal is what we’re all about.”
In a NPR segment on sex without intimacy that aired in June, 25-year-old Elizabeth Welsh is quoted, saying, “Going out on a date is a sort of ironic, obsolete type of thing. Going out on a date to dinner and a movie? It's so cliché — isn't that funny?"
In that same NPR segment, 25-year-old Mary Wilkerson shares that she hadn’t found much intimacy with the men she’d encountered in her twenties, especially those in New York City, where she found people seemed even more emotionally detached.
"For many of us, the requisite vulnerability and exposure that comes from being really intimate with someone in a committed sense is kind of threatening,” said Wilkerson.
She added, “the thought of being in love with someone is the most terrifying thing.”
I, too, had a "Tom and Summer" experience recently. In the spring, I dated a nice man for a few months. At the time, we hung out a lot. Since he was planning to move away in the fall, we knew our paths would diverge eventually. We wavered between “seeing each other” and “dating.” I was perpetually confused about “what we were,” but of course I pretended I wasn’t.
One day, in June, while we strolling back from getting ice cream, he turned to me and said, “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.” After a second, or two, I glanced at him, put on my poker face, and nodded nonchalantly, “okay.”
He was cordial and apologetic, and said he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I responded with a confident shrug and assured him I was just fine.
Of course, I wasn’t. I was surprised, mostly. But I didn't ask any questions, nor did I probe for an explanation. We still had five more blocks to walk, so I changed the subject to inquire about a book I recently lent him. Less than ten minutes later, when we reached the “T” stop where he was to turn left for his apartment and I was to turn right, it was a polite “goodbye and good luck” and by the time I reached my apartment door, it felt like the brief courtship had never happened to begin with.
What bothers me is not that we parted ways, but rather, that I acted in accordance to the ideology that “not-quite-a-relationship” situations don’t warrant explanations or upfront communication. I didn’t have the courage to ask him why he had suddenly changed his mind; I feared appearing too emotionally involved in a situation that never had long-term potential to begin with.
What is also complicated is how young people get into this sort-of dating situation to begin with. It seems hard to believe, but most of the men who pursued me throughout the last five years have somehow utilized online communication in the pursuit, whether that's e-mail, Facebook, or whatnot. This isn’t because social media is replacing face-to-face interaction. Rather, e-communication tools like Facebook and e-mail are non-threatening media which allow us to casually gauge each others’ interest, all while keeping our guard up behind computer screens. Technology allows us to keep space, physically and figuratively, between ourselves and the individuals we’re interested in pursuing. As technology increasingly permeates our lives, will we continue to half-heartedly pursue each other online?
In a review of Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, Ann Friedman, an editor at Feministing.com, writes the definitive conclusion of this book is that casual college hookups have created a generation of young women who don’t care about love.
I doubt this is true. Women, whether they hook up or not, aren’t apathetic towards love. I think women and men still want to love and be loved, at some point in their adult years.
But while we might care about love, that doesn't mean we don't fear love, perhaps because we've normalized not loving each other--especially in a romantic sense. Surely, this decorum of non-committal dating culture perpetuates our fear of love and emotional involvement.
Then again, maybe my hunch is off. Maybe I should post something on Facebook about all this and see who comments.
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