Love Lost: What This Generation Doesn't Understand About Relationships

While our grandparents are happy when they are able to call someone with their smartphone without breaking their fingers, we Millennials are able to chat, share, interact and build entire businesses with a small technical device.

We are the children of the technological revolution, and most of us are better at coping with the extremely fast technological changes than our parents and grandparents are.

However, while we were taught to interact with devices and to think like machines, we forgot how to feel like human beings.

We are the first generation who understands the workings of social media, but at the same time, we don’t understand what it really means to love. We are so connected to the Internet, but we are so disconnected from our hearts.

I am here to show you what you must understand about love:

Loving someone doesn’t lead to instant gratification.

We live in a time when everything has to be instantly available. We order instant coffees, we cook instant noodles and we even go on instant dates.

In a day and age when you can download and order everything with the click of a mouse, it is very tempting to assume that love is just another thing that produces instant gratification.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

There might be the concept of love at first sight, even though this feeling can also be interpreted as a rush of emotions that is caused by an immediate feeling of attraction. Everything has to be instant, but love isn’t.

Love is like a tree. In order to make it work, you need strong roots and the patience to let it grow over the years. If you're looking for instant gratification, you should choose one-night stands over finding the love of your life.

Love means giving and receiving.

The deadly disease that has the power to ruin our generation's long-term happiness and relationships is called the special snowflake syndrome.

In case you ever want to be in a fulfilling relationship with a partner who loves you, you should work on overcoming your special snowflake syndrome. If you want this relationship to last longer than two months before you break up because of some completely irrational reason, you absolutely must overcome this syndrome.

Love is a two-way street. Without the right balance between giving and receiving, love can easily turn into repulsion.

Please, don’t get me wrong; it is totally okay to have your own opinion and to expect your partner to support you. However, if you don’t give a damn about the opinion of your partner, and if you are too entitled to support your partner, the end of the love that was supposed to last forever is inevitable.

Love can’t be restarted like a computer game.

What do we do when our phone or laptop doesn’t work the way we want it to?

In the first few seconds, we panic like lost children who are searching for their mothers. In the next couple of minutes, we ask ourselves how we could possibly survive the day without Facebook and Instagram. After about 20 minutes, we decide to call someone who is able to repair that goddamn thing.

If repairing a relationship with a person you love would be that easy, everybody would be happily in love, and every dance course for singles would be empty.

The assumption that everything can be repaired or restarted by pressing a few buttons can easily lead to the assumption that you can fix relationships and human emotions in the same way.

Well, if you could restart a relationship the same way you can restart a computer game, I would still be together with my ex-girlfriend.