Daniel GingrasThe “Long Distance Relationship” has become a rite of passage for our generation. In high school or perhaps more appropriately “puberty playground,” our rapidly developing loins and amateur hearts conned our juvenile brains into believing we’d found love. The technology of communication has transformed miles into milliseconds; long distance has become more of an idiotic trend and less of a true test of love. I have respect for diehards of yore who; willing to wait days at a time for love letters penned out in ink, bravely endured isolation – endured the absence of body and soul. I am bothered by of the innocents of today, who are saturating lives life with just one person and forfeited many other promising opportunities – enduring only the geographic impossibility of intercourse. In our modern lives, long distance relationships are no longer the romantic feats they once were.
In the past, a long distance relationship came about because of serious circumstances, not choices. And a strong relationship was usually already in existence, having to be adjusted on account of sea journeys, wartime, etc- Woefully, your teenage relationship with the first girl to ever touch your penis does not automatically count as “strong.” The tools that enable communication are strong, and albeit abundant, but that doesn’t mean they must be used. In my years at Poly, I’ve noticed the teenagers, always so in love, but only with the idea of being in love itself. I don’t see them smiling as they converse with their far-away lovers, gently wishing they could be together. I see them completing phone calls like chores or other times crying, screaming and yelling. I see drunken infidelity under the lack of a threat to being caught. ‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you’ isn’t part of the trust that ‘true love’ would seem to imply to me. I see teenagers so stuck on the romantic notion that their love will withstand all obstacles, that they’re missing the blatant indicators of incompatibility and waning interest and in turn forgoing their chances for improvement.
College-bound couples would do so well to break their ties in their pursuit of identity and satisfaction. It’s become obvious to me that if two people really do love each other enough, their bond will endure whether it was explicitly agreed upon or not. I think the biggest barriers for these kids to realize this are their emotional inexperience. Personally, I look back on my freshman year long distance relationship, (everyone had one, no one still has one ” it hurts my brain just thinking about it) and I see the susceptibility to jealousy and the predisposition to over protection in my immature mind. I also see the missed opportunities to explore physical and mental attraction to all different kinds of people while I’m still young and still making decisions about the kind of person I want to spend the rest of my life with.
` Anyways, I don’t mean to offend any of you “true loves” out there, unless of course you’re just faking it. But if all we youths seem to think we have true love until it dissolves, how can we really tell? All I can really say for sure is that Adam Levine is absolutely right when he sings that “it’s not always rainbows and butterflies, it’s compromise that moves us along” ” True love has got to be some from column A, some from column B.
For questions, comments or to learn about the risks of brain tumors associated with extended cell phone use, write to dgingras@calpoly.edu.