A relationship that lasts less than recharging a cell phone

Hello friends!

A couple of years ago, I was talking to my grandmother and she was telling me how absurd she thought it was that a relative of ours had separated after a few years of marriage. For her, marriage was indissoluble, that is, for life. And a few days ago, I was talking to my 14-year-old daughter, and she was telling me that she made a bet with a friend that her relationship wouldn’t last longer than a cell phone recharge. Result: she won the bet.

There is a very interesting book by the sociologist Bauman about how love relationships have been transformed in recent decades. The examples above, of the difference in reality for my grandmother and my daughter, summarize the issue. Relationships seem to be lasting less and less. Of course, in adolescence it is common not to consider that a love will last a lifetime. As in the phrase, “may it be eternal while it lasts”, being in love can last a summer, a week, or less than a day.

From my personal experience, I have had contact with both situations. Marriages that lasted and last a lifetime, the increase in divorces (did you know that in Brazil divorce was only fully legalized in 1977?) and the ever-increasing growth of relationships, if you can call it that, which has practically no duration : the creation of staying. People stop being together to stay together, without commitment, without an idea or ideal of fidelity.

In Bauman’s book, there is the following sentence that I thought was brilliant:

“Unlike real relationships, virtual relationships are easy to get in and out of. Compared to the real thing, heavy, slow and confusing, they look smart and clean, easy to use, understand and handle”.

In an interview, a 28-year-old said about his preference for virtual relationships, over the internet, over “face-to-face” relationships: “You can always hit the delete key”.

And further on, Bauman writes:

“As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, when slithering over thin ice, speed is the salvation. When one is betrayed by quality, one tends to seek revenge in quantity”.

For those unfamiliar with Bauman’s work, he became known worldwide for the book Liquid Modernity🇧🇷 In the master’s degree, we studied this work. The central thesis is that from the 20th century on, society has been transformed in such a way that institutions and practices have changed from rigidity and fixity to “liquidity”, to fluidity, with ever faster changes and, consequently, instability. at the same time that there is more and more freedom for individuals to exercise, as Stuart Hall would say, a changing identity. That is, instead of people adopting a fixed, stable and practically unchangeable identity throughout life, subjects have more freedom (and perhaps anguish) to change their identity in different contexts or moments of life.

With the success of Liquid Modernity, Bauman wrote a series of books about this modern liquidity, among them, there is also the context of liquid relationships, Liquid Loves.

The difficulty of relating

In the opinion of the elders, marriage would have to be for life. With that, it was a very important choice to make, often less a matter of choosing than being chosen or chosen. Of course, many people did not marry. I remember now Blavastky who faced social conventions and said that marriage was like a lottery. After all, one did not always have time to get to know the person with whom the eternal bond would be realized. It could be the best or worst of all worlds.

As in the quote above, today we see a different situation. It’s as if this anguish of choosing someone for life no longer exists. The search for Prince Charming, however, continues to be a dream for girls, although for them too the quantity is less and less an affront to their social evaluation.

The difficulty of relating today is the difficulty of realizing that a love relationship is not a fairy tale, that is, it is not rare to face unpleasant situations, overcome conflicts, deal with fights and disagreements.

Since relationships tend to be quick and perhaps disposable, why struggle to deal with the unpleasantness? As the student said, it’s easier to press the delete button, delete from social networks, permanently delete the contact and start over.

But, curiously, the market for publications, magazines, books, websites that aim to teach or give relationship tips has grown a lot. The problem is that the tips – while they may be helpful from time to time – overlook the huge individual differences between people.

In the psychology office, we see these huge differences every day. Which makes us have to be critical of any canned, uniform orientation, with universal pretensions. After all, what works for one person won’t work for the next…

Conclusion

We have seen a great social transformation in the way relationships are seen, from a generation born in 1930, 1940 for whom marriage was indissoluble, to a continuous loosening in the following generations until the current generation, for whom it is totally common that a relationship does not last not even a day.

Like everything, there are advantages and disadvantages. The great difficulty resides in the impatience to face the common crises of each and every relationship, these crises, smaller or bigger, that are based on the own individual differences.

Despite this context of fluidity in relationships, we see the emergence of completely opposite trends such as those in favor of family and order, religions that exalt virginity and marriage as before, but, more often, we see that in solitude that does not disappear in quantity of love affairs, the desire to find that special someone, who would fill all the void.

Related