By Maggie Nesselroade
It’s modern. It’s exciting. It’s fresh. It’s new. But is it right-minded? Is it honorable? Is it upstanding? Is it good? In light of the Valentine’s Day feature “A Modern Love Story” in the Feb. 15 issue of the Collegian, I began to ruminate on where our culture has decidedly plopped its standards for our relationships, concepts of love and human interactions.
Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that society has strayed from the utopian gates of love and relationships. We have clearly not yet found them. But I do believe we’re starting to take a few wrong turns that are only serving to push us further off track. The capability to find another person with whom we can begin to share our hearts, allowing him or her to see us for our fears and faults, is an inherently human trait, yet we’re beginning to reduce it to star ratings and “hot or not” scales.
It’s like within Asbury culture we have suddenly begun to lose our ability to catch our cute classmate and ask them a question on the way out of class because we’d much rather swipe right for another boy named Chad with a shirtless mirror picture on Tinder. Relationships require risk and vulnerability, yet society is conditioning us to believe we can find “true love” without ever stepping out of our comfort zone. Call me a romantic or call me an idealist, but I want no part in this modern love if it means reducing another human down to a one to 10 scale.
Real love is gritty. It means choosing to accept people for everything they have to offer you, but even more so for everything that they don’t. Creating a roster of men with an elaborate rating system is damaging — not trendy. The modern world is telling you that the person you’re looking for should get an off-the-charts score in every category you can think of, but that is not real life. You must learn to care for someone despite all of his or her flaws. Looking for the 10/10 person in every single area of life is not only exhausting — it’s disappointing. I am not saying that we should just lower our standards and date anyone, but rather that we should look at the tremendous amount of faults we see in ourselves and awaken to the reality that there will never be a “perfect” person.
We must begin to see the implicit value in other people before we deem ourselves ready for a relationship. Contemporary American culture is telling us that sifting through other people on dating apps like we’re car shopping is the best way to go. We are encouraged to check out the physical appearance on that one while testing another’s conversational skills over here. Better yet, let’s keep track on a spreadsheet. Forget the fact that we are completely dehumanizing people; in the modern world, it’s all about us. But if that’s the case, we might as well just date ourselves because that’s the only person we’re willing to think about.
