The way we Millennials approach the prospect of lasting love has always frustrated me, because we don’t. As I prepare to enter into the Great Unknown of adulthood with the rest of my Millennials, I’m observing something that, truthfully, scares the crap out of me. I’m familiarizing myself more and more with the fact that I’m one of the last of a dying breed of humans once known as romantics. We romantics approach prospective big loves with a timid sort of reverence, because so much happiness lies in store pending the potential success of this big love. We romantics believe in the quest for The One: the idea that somewhere out there, in humanity’s labyrinth that we call emotion, is someone who will connect to us. We believe in Ferris wheel rides and candlelit dinners, teddy bears and roses, parting kisses before bed and waking up the next day with someone we can call home. But it seems that less and less of us are approaching our prospective big loves…because fewer and fewer of us even care to consider that idea anymore.

We are all too familiar with the way technology has bound us with the temptation of instant gratification at our fingertips. We tap twice, and a car comes to take us wherever we need to go. We swipe a couple of times, and food arrives at our doors within twenty minutes. We type in a word we don’t know, and within two to four seconds, we know what that word is. This sudden addiction to this instant gratification is slowly eroding what used to make us special, complete—dare I say, human. What we can’t tangibly define or understand, we now dismiss as unreal—or worse, old-fashioned. What we can’t find the answers to on Google, we now ignore. We’re slowly losing our ability to ask questions that have no answer, simply because we’ve become so accustomed to the minimal effort it takes to get an answer.

This obviously poses a problem for the prospect of love, because love is a thicket of impossible questions:

What is love?
Is what I’m feeling really love?
Are we meant to be more than this together?
Do you love me?
Why do you love me?
Why do I love you?

These aren’t questions we can Google our way through. No one, in the thousands of years of our existence, has been able to fully answer these questions—and it’s not for lack of trying. But then again, will we ever reach a universal answer? The great Greek philosopher Plato believed that humans would never be able to truly define and realize what was around us. For instance let’s analyze something we think we universally understand; let’s analyze a chair. According to Plato, what we are able to define as a chair pales in comparison to the true concept of the Chair; beyond humanity’s comprehensions of what we believe to be a chair lies this truth. And the more we elaborate and expand our definition of a chair—whether it be through other cultures’ definitions of a chair, or through your own personal musings of what a chair is—the closer and closer we’ll get to realizing the impossible, inexpressible concept of the Chair.
But we’ll never really get there—we’re never going to reach the definitive answer, because the quest to truly define is asymptotic. And this branch of philosophy applies to every idea and every material object that has ever entered this world, which brings me to this point. If we can’t even truly define things that we believe are tangible, such as a chair, how will we ever be able to define what is already abstract to us? How can we define Love when we can’t even understand what we know as love?
Therein lies the crux of the issue. We Millennials have given up on trying to define Love before we’ve even started to understand love. We’re puzzled by love’s complexities as it is, so we don’t even attempt to continue past that—because attempting to really think about love, and attempting to get closer to the truth about Love, requires thinking. We can’t Google “love vs. Love” and get the answer. Because we can’t input feelings far beyond the grasp of words into a search engine and have them define it for us, we don’t define them at all. Instead, we turn to means of distraction to fill up the blank space we feel; we turn to cheap imitations of a love that pales in comparison to the Love that Plato believed was beyond the reach of language.
Thus, we turn to casual sex as a means of gratifying our animal need. Sex is easy; love is not. One-night stands are easy; finding the one is not. Trying to fill up the well of loneliness we Millennials inherently fear with f*** buddies and Facebook friends is easy; acquainting ourselves with the difference between solitude and loneliness, and finding someone to fill up our loneliness while accepting that solitude is okay, is not. We Millennials have given up on love because giving up on love is easy. Giving up on love means not risking getting hurt by the quest for love; giving up on love means not having to think about what our feelings are, how special they are, and why they’re so special. Giving up on love means withdrawing ourselves further within ourselves, limiting interaction with humanity to nothing more than a right swipe on Tinder and an easy, meaningless night.
Are we as humans about to let go of something that has captivated us for so long? Are we at the point where love plays second fiddle to sex because sex is easier to navigate? What will happen when love, romance, and the idea of the one fades into nonexistence because not enough people are thinking about it and fighting for it?
What will happen to the few romantics left?