How Can We Be So Heartless?

After reading the short story about The Other Women I couldn’t help but write this blog about our generation’s relationship culture. There have been many blogs written about our generations lack of love such as “the hook-up culture” or “is chivalry dead? Which makes it seem that our generation is heartless. When being honest here, I think that our lack of commitment is linked to our expectations to succeed. In other words, I don’t think monogamous relationships are dead or that guys and girls prefer to have a “no label” relationship.  I just firmly believe that the pressure to succeed and becoming recognized in the workforce has blinded us from our commitment to someone.

Elite Daily blogger Erica Gordon describes the hook-up culture as “appealing in part because it is so low-risk”.  Taking risks is what makes us afraid, that one who takes risks can win it all or lose it all.  That is why our generation prefers to secure the job and risk the relationship than risk the job and have a relationship.  Nowadays having a good paying job after college is every graduates dream; in order to accomplish the goal we must have no distractions. Relationships are considered a distraction and an expenditure, it seems like they are being treated as tasks rather than personal bonds.

Come the weekend, the majority of our generation prefers to get drunk and hook up rather than go to dinner and the movies with our significant other. As said by the narrator of The Other Women “now the days I’m not hung over feel unnatural”(54). By no means am I calling us drunks, I just believe that we prefer to be Gatsby’s rather than be in a Disney fairy tale.

So what can we do in order to fix this “Don Juan” image that our generation has? First of all I think that we have to take pressure off of what our parents expectations are.  We are not them! I am not a doctor and I am not a finance genius; I am, myself, a struggling English major. Andrew Reiner from The New York Times speaks about our current “love society” and how our pressure to succeed is linked to our lack of romance. “Then there are the familiar lyrics from their parents — rants about why grades, internships and anything else that makes their résumés appear more extraordinary trump romantic relationships”.  Becoming someone and having independence from our parents is important for our future growth. However, we cannot let that blind us from having a significant other with whom we can share our struggles. Call me a hopeless romantic but love deserves a chance.

I don’t know about you, but I am tired of those 12 AM “wyd” messages and hearing “I just don’t want to be committed right now”. We are all afraid of being vulnerable, but if we don’t take the risk we will never know. So it is up to us to balance our eagerness to succeed with our wiliness to share our life with another person.  There are way too many articles and memes about our generation’s lack of commitment. Just because we don’t see white picket fences as our future we shouldn’t be call “heartless”.

Works Cited

Gordon, Erica. "How Accepting The Hook-Up Culture Is Getting 20-Somethings Nowhere." Elite Daily How Accepting The HookUp Culture Is Getting 20Somethings Nowhere Comments. N.p., 29 July 2014. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.

Myers, Courtney. "The Other Women." The Truth About the Fact International Journal of Literary Nonfiction. N.p.: Loyola Marymount Univ & the Dept, 2014. 51-58. Print.

Reiner, Andrew. "Love, Actually." The New York Times. The New York Times, 08 Feb. 2014. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.