Life. Love. War. When you say them out loud, the words fall awkwardly off your tongue.
In a perfect world, these words would have no connection to each other. They would just be three words, spread far apart on pages in a dictionary.
But ultimately, these words have a deep, dysfunctional relationship with one another. They are the closest of cousins.
For if you have lived, you have most likely loved. And if you have loved, you have most likely been a victim to, a participant in, or a proponent of war.
Feelings are your weapons of choice. And those weapons are full of the deadliest ammunition-words.
Love is the Baskin Robins of life. There are probably over 31 different flavors, and if you live long enough, you’ll probably experience them all.
By itself, it is already an incredibly multi-faceted emotion.
And just when you think it cannot possibly get any more complicated, you get a relationship request on Facebook from your significant other.
Love and technology do not mix. But no one knows why.
Facebook has become a world-renowned technological success that has been largely responsible for the evolution of communication.
It has simplified communication. Some might even go so far as to say that it has simultaneously complicated the process of communication.
I disagree.
Our issue with social media is not that it has further complicated the process of communication. It is that it has oversimplified it.
It has reduced it to this casual typing or texting. And, how could we forget about the occasional insertion of emotocons for emphasis.
And now, the awkward conversations that once took hours to even initiate can be completed in a matter of minutes.
All these things fail to represent any substantial simulation for the real thing.
And this is why teen magazine covers boast article titles that read, “Facebook ruined my relationship.”
Love lives in so many different locations. It thrives in so many different climates. But, cyberspace is not its natural habitat.
Love suffocates at the hands of Facebook. It is choked off from all life and light and air.
We have to acknowledge that these enhancements in communication were meant to be just that – enhancements.
They were not meant to substitute for the real thing. And they never can.
As much as it pains us to separate ourselves our fingers from those keys on our laptops or our thumbs from the QWERTY board on our Blackberrys, we have to come to a realization about where we really stand with technology.
It feels so unnatural to sit in class for a few hours without an opportunity to text. But that’s the thing. Nothing about technology is natural.
It detracts from communication in its most organic form and yet, somehow in all our feeble-minded humanity, we expect that the purest, most organic form of emotion should be able to survive through battery operated devices.
Love is something to be felt. Something to be seen. Something to be experienced in real time.
And as long as we try to operate our love lives through phones and computers, we will never realize that these things do not propogate emotion.
They do not help us further it. In fact, they separate us from it.
I used to text my boyfriend before I went to bed, “I luv u.” He would never text me back.
Finally, I called him and asked why he never would reply to those messages and he told me, in his own words, that that those little messages that I thought were so cute and sincere were everything but.
My text messagesand Facebook status posts did not express true love. They only cheapened it.
Love is meant to be pure. And when we communicate it through tools other than our hands, our words, or our hearts, we have diluted it.
So now, I do not type it. I dare not text it. I’d rather drive the farthest distance just to say it to his face.
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