“I’ve come to accept the fact that someone is going to cheat on me at least once,” said my 16-year-old sister, in a painfully matter-of-fact way.
If this doesn’t make you want to celebrate Valentine’s Day, then I don’t know what will.
Lately I’ve been getting this sinking feeling that love ““ or at least the idealized notion of love ““ has grown stale in our generation.
We all start out with such hope in our first relationships. But after a while, everything just seems so temporary that you can’t help but wonder if anything ““ even love ““ lasts.
As we experience more in life, it is inevitable that we will become jaded.
Even so, despite our cynicism toward relationships, in the end we are surprisingly (and sometimes embarrassingly) hopeful romantics.
It just might not seem like that on the surface.
There is understandable skepticism over such concepts as finding your soulmate ““ the one person in the world who will “complete your life.”
But while our disbelief is a sign of our jadedness, it is also quite liberating.
To believe in a soulmate is to be on a constant search for that one person out of billions who is meant to be yours.
If this really were the case, we’d better be hell-bent on finding that person because if ““ God forbid ““ they slip through the cracks, we’re basically screwed.
It makes sense then that not many people are structuring their lives around this.
“Nothing is destined to be. Love catches you by surprise and grows on you. It’s not so theatrical and staged,” said June Pai, a second-year psychology student.
Without the idea of a soulmate, if a relationship that you thought was The One ends, you won’t necessarily be destined to a life filled with drunken nights spent alone and crying into your Healthy Choice TV dinner.
Instead, there are countless possibilities for solid and happy relationships.
Thus, the more jaded we are about love, the more selective we’ll be when it comes to relationships. And, really, is that such a bad thing?
“If being more mindful of relationships helps to tilt the balance toward good choices of partners and good management of our intimate lives … then I do see that as a positive effect,” said psychology Professor Thomas Bradbury in an e-mail interview.
In the end, no matter how jaded we are, if something good comes along that passes all the tests we may have subconsciously created, we usually won’t ignore it. We are ultimately hopeful about love.
“Love isn’t forced or fabricated. It’s just something you end up feeling and knowing. Even though there are negatives ““ how couldn’t there be? It’s natural. The point is that what is felt dominates any of those negatives,” said Andres Santa-Cruz, a fourth-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student.
I am a rather jaded individual, but I also see myself as somewhat of a romantic, though not the typical romantic: I don’t particularly like Nicholas Sparks, I think chocolate is an unnecessary gift, and I know that lighting candles during sex creates a fire hazard.
But I am a romantic in the sense that I believe in a love that is real. There won’t always be huge proclamations of love, and some nights the most action you’ll get is whatever “Grey’s Anatomy” has to offer. But that doesn’t mean it’s not love.
I believe in love, just realistically.
Maybe we are just learning to adapt to a more skeptical world in which love is still a possibility.
We may not believe in soulmates or love at first sight, but the most important thing is that, despite how jaded we’ve become, we still actually have hope.
And in this cynical world, a little hope can go a long way.
Excited about all the tail you’ll be getting tonight? And by tail, she means the lobster tail during a romantic dinner. E-mail Bel at bpoblador@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.