Love in the Year 2009

Well, here we are in the year 2009. We’ve evolved, we’ve changed, we had to but in amongst this craze of creative evolement there are some fundamental laws which always stay the same. One of these is LOVE, everybody is looking for love.

But what are the laws of love? These days it’s difficult to know. In it’s purest form, it’s about attraction- finding someone who sets your conscious into orbit. Knowing what you’d like is the easiest part of it, the next bit is finding that person.

Maybe you’d find someone at work, or they’d sit next to you in a club or a friend would introduce them…but these days with the Internet is love becoming a joke? I’m talking about social networking, a term which I find to be ironic in the most extreme form. There is nothing social about sitting at YOUR computer, on YOUR own, reading YOUR facebook. Maybe you find someone who is ‘mutual friends’ with someone you know and you friend request them…

Step 1: We’re friends. There was no having a chat over a drink, the only ‘clicking’ we did was with a mouse. Step 2: Communicating and building a friendship, seeing what we have in common. Well, we decide to write on each other’s walls or maybe even send a few personal messages to test out whether writing ‘x x x’ in private goes down well. Is your heart racing when you see you have a reply?  Step 3: Having gotten close. I say close but having things in common, sharing friends or liking pictures is not chemistry. It’s now about exchanging numbers and then deciding to meet. Uh oh.

The point of finding a partner or even just a friend, is the communication between you two but in 2009 we’ve reached such a point where there’s this huge thing in the relationship with us – a huge electronic device that needs to be shut down at the end of every conversation. People are so obsessed, it’s not about dressing up, flirting, exploring and actually having an amazing time together, it’s about how good I look on my night out so I can look my total-best when these images surface on facebook. Must make sure my default image is stunning, perhaps even photo enhanced, so that I can experience the heights of attention rather than the depths of desperation.

It’s still attention, fair play but is it actually real? It’s not the same thrill as accidentally locking eye contact with someone you find attractive & getting a buzz shoot through your body as you struggle with your desire to find out if they like you.

So say you actually meet and you like this person, then what happens? You forget the contract that states facebook is the 3rd member of this relationship, most of your time in communication is via a computer – isn’t that hiding? The definition of security is your partner clicking ‘I like’ underneath an image of you. Then after a while, it’s not working and you have to adhere to the humiliation of 497 friends knowing you’ve went from a relationship to being single again. Worryingly this has become the norm, teenagers all over the World have been brought up on cyber canoodling.

That’s not what dating is about. It’s about contact and letting yourself go, surrendering to your feelings. Adding a virtual aspect to this is just hiding, it’s taking the easy road, it’s playing it safe and here’s the thing, when you’re in love you don’t need to play it safe. And the sad thing is, I’ve been roped into it myself and I’m making the decision to live in the real World. Not to say there isn’t some aspects to the Cyber World which are beneficial but how much more exciting and rewarding would it be if you made a fool or yourself, tripped up over your tongue, felt your heart race when eyes actually moved when you looked at them. That you took the brave road and made one of the biggest perks of life real.