Headlines continue to fill news-feeds and they all seem to be along the lines of "Millenials fail to sustain relationships," and "Oh, studies show that women aren’t having children young enough!" Then there's the "Dating services lead to the end of the real dating world." It is almost as if the clichés of these political views are as common as the cliché of Baby boomers sticking their noses in places they don’t belong. For instance, the lives of Millennials who have adapted to, and grown and thrived with a completely new age of technological advances, rights, and cultural appreciations.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve heard it all - we’re too selfish, too lazy, too reckless to find someone and settle down and that honestly isn’t all wrong! However, perhaps it’s about time we look at this from a different, obvious point of view. We millennials are reckless. We are a generation of fearless challengers competing to be the next person to change the world. So please tell me, in a world filled with so much opportunity, so much living to be lived and chances to be taken - why in the world would we want to settle?
Times have changed, honey
The most common excruciatingly overused quote I have seen on the topic of millennials and relationships stems from a beautiful elderly couple who were brought up and married in a time far different from ours.
When asked the question, “how is it that you stayed happily married for more than 50 years?” they replied with “we come from a time that when something was broken we didn’t throw it away. We fixed it instead.” What a tear jerker, right?
Well, it’s time someone says it - as beautiful as it is that generations before us survived their marriages with the notion of fix rather than throw away, I’d like to introduce to you the new, the improved 21St Century. You’ve said is yourselves, baby-boomers - we are living in a far more privileged, far less strict world these days.
If we don’t want to fix something, we don’t have to fix it. If we don’t want it in the first place, we don’t have to have it. Casual sex has become the norm and promiscuous flings make up our average Saturday night. It has never been about Millennials not having the emotional capacity to find someone to settle down with. It is literally just that we have become smart enough to realize that we have the opportunity to choose!
Social Media has paved a way for us as individuals to decide what we want our love lives to look like.
From matchmaker to Tinder, E-harmony to Fetlife, these platforms have ensured that as a generation of ‘recklessness’ and ‘emotional instability’ we have endless opportunities to meet, explore, experience and enjoy the first half of our lives. And we can do it without worrying about the societal standards that generations before us have felt forced to contribute to.
So, what's the rush?
For our generation, there is no expectation for us to be ready to settle down or grow up. We live in a world where we have the ability to literally speak face-to-face with someone from the other side of the world, through a flat screen and tiny microphone. We aren’t going to spend our time worrying about the boy or girl next door.
If we can freely speak of and be a part of our own sexual culture, why would we limit ourselves to a single partner that we might have a spark with?
For Millenials, it’s time to live the best lives we can imagine. Love? Marriage? Kids? It can wait.
