Three little words

“And I won't be held responsible
she fell in love in the first place

For the life of me I cannot remember
What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise
For the life of me I cannot believe we'd ever die for these sins”
-“The Freshmen”
The Verve Pipe

We’re an unfortunate thing, our generation. Not only did we grow up listening to the heart-break songs of the 80s and 90s, but we grew up with the covers too- slower, more painful, more poignant versions of what’s been done before. We’ve spent too long lost in the “free falling” world of John Mayer. And while I will receive immediate backlash for the comparison in this statement: I think that’s always been us; an army of John Mayer’s, too tired, too jaded to commit. Our parents would say it’s because we’re selfish or lazy and that we spend all our time complaining we are too young to change the world instead of just doing it-but somewhere “ deep inside” we understand we are a backlash to our parents’ generation. We watched their marriages fall apart or struggle to stay glued together, and receded into our poetry, our blogs or our own covers. You know, something cliché, something stereotypically Gen Y.

But we’re optimistic, well, at the beginning anyway. We ride on butterflies and hormones better than any synthetic drug we can get our hands on. I know, “every generation thinks they invented sex,” or love, for that matter. But I think what separates us is the way we shy away admitting we have un-manufactured feelings in the first place. Of course we didn’t hear it enough when we were younger, but it didn’t leave us psychologically scarred. It just left us a little better prepared…

Or so we say…

Instead it makes us freak when we hear it. It feels so absurdly random that it must be a joke. “Love” is colloquial for us. It is an “ily” when we hear something funny. It is Ten Things I Hate About You and Prada backpacks. It is better associated with infatuation than with the real deal.

The first time you say it and don’t hear it back, you learn why it is so damn terrifying in the first place. It is not a one-time loss word, it creates a continuous rejection, that doesn’t create the void (after all, Gen Y is built with a hollow center) but it stretches through your stomach and occasionally up through your mouth, and your words become less trusting, less forgiving. He starts to think, to doubt, to feel like everything he does means so much more to you than to him, until it really becomes true. But he can’t be held responsible; he’s only telling the truth. We are perpetually too young, it’s too early. It’s not that we don’t want to grow up, it’s that we did very young, but we buried the adulthood in crude jokes and blue jeans, because it hurts less that way.

But like I said, it’s a continuous rejection. Every goodbye plays those long silences through your head. Any sign of closeness is a flashing warning sign screaming “RUN!” Any significant moment, any further infatuation makes you feel too emotional and too cold at the same time. You have nothing to offer this world, remember? So you don’t and if you are lucky you can chalk it up to the fact that you were “merely freshmen” and still not someone old enough to know better. Take the Valium and forget about it, you’re not allowed to not move on.

It’s 2010, and about time women earned equal pay

http://www.usforacle.com/opinion/it-s-2010-and-about-time-women-earned-equal-pay-1.2376934

"We're just talking": The etymology of Post-modern romance

Define Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia, my literature paper ordered. “Um…” I said turning to my friend, “how about, person he is not friends with, not dating, not hooking up with, but thinking about it?”

“So in other words, they’re ‘talking’,” she says as she raises two fingers to make little quotes in the air. Describing Shakespeare’s characters born centuries before our generation makes us realize that defining relationships have not gotten any less complicated. (Although occasionally it sounds like a valid solution, I hope none of us are planning on pulling an Ophelia and jumping off trees any time soon.)

Since Shakespeare’s cursed whatever-they-are’s do not reveal their ages, it makes you wonder when all this nonsense starts. Its easy to trace the confusion back to some disaster from our early teens, but at what age does the definition of “talking” become something other than talking?

I’ve heard the term used to describe everything from texting someone you may like to screwing around with someone you aren’t exactly committed to-quite the opposite of just talking. How did a phrase that simple become so ridiculously complicated?

The phrase “hooking-up” on the other hand does have a history. It originated in a book from the seventies about an open marriage and never received a strict definition. Seventeen magazine usually defines it as kissing, the more sophisticated use the term to describe a one-night stand, and others use it to characterize anything in-between.

Figuring out whether to call a situation a hook-up, “friends with benefits”, or dating is not an easy task, leaving many of us to wonder if we can call what’s-his-face a boyfriend.

“Hook-ups” are not even the beginning of the term-confusion that those of us born in the 80s and very early 90s are experiencing (God save the love lives of those born later). Boundaries or lack thereof are a whole other story. High school students aren’t even sure if they have boundaries and college students have trouble determining whether relationships involved coercion or not.

Those who are a little less thrilled with this whole “casual” thing have a myriad of reasons why they aren’t getting involved, ranging from “so not dealing with him right now” to “totally hung-up on this other loser.”

Then, there are all these transitional stages on the journey from friendship to that whole marriage deal (whatever you would like to define that as):

“Talking,” friends with benefits, hooking-up, broken-up but still seeing each other, broken up but still fooling around, on and off, may-be-on-and-off- but-I-don’t-know-because-we’re-on the-“off,” simply “seeing each other”, together, living together, engaged to be engaged, and the ever popular “I don’t even know” complete with exasperated sigh and hands thrown up, and all of these subjectively undefined terms make those who “don’t know “ greatly envy those who are simply “dating.”

Wouldn’t it have been easier in the Jane Austen days? You just had “courting,” “betrothed,” “married,” or simply nothing at all. And wouldn’t rules be nice? What happened to rules?

Don’t you just love the feeling of never knowing what is going on? It starts to make you wonder why any of us even attempt this whole love business in the first place. But then you’re back to square one with the “this being alone thing sucks” and the “hey’s” and the dancing and the “whatever we are doing” thing and you realize that maybe its kind of inevitable and for a good reason.

We simply weren’t designed to be alone and while the whole process is just a little overwhelming, it’s what gets us to whatever it is we define as “happy.” We just need to find someone who’s been reading the same dictionary.