Christensen: A generation too cynical to love

My literature professor asked us to write down three things that would bring happiness. One of… My literature professor asked us to write down three things that would bring happiness. One of my classmates wrote “love.” I had thought about putting it down myself but wrote a short list of material items instead. Love is cliché.

Upon hearing love, however, my professor, Uma Satyavolu, threw out her arms in excitement. “Why, of course!”

She went on to say that she had taught courses in Shakespeare, and students shifted uncomfortably in their seats when confronted with sonnets.

“It took me a long time to understand adolescent love,” Satyavolu said. “Why, if someone says, ‘I am deeply, passionately in love with you,’ if someone says ‘I want to spend an eternity with you,’ it’s creepy. Love scares people!”

“But how does anyone woo anyone anymore?” she asked.

Nobody woos anybody anymore, not really. If they do, it’s with late-night texts and mixed messages. If someone writes a love poem, she isn’t going to share it. If someone really is in love, he won’t say it first.

Yet taken at face value, our reluctance doesn’t seem to make sense. Falling in love should be easier than ever before. In America, arranged marriages are obsolete. We can be with the person we really want to be with, regardless of money or caste. We don’t even have to get married if we don’t want to. Birth control and contraceptives mean we can often have sex without becoming sick or pregnant. Homosexuality is more acceptable than in centuries prior.

In literature, characters only fall in love when there is an obstacle — “Romeo and Juliet” is the easiest and most obvious example. And in the greatest love stories, the characters barely know each other. Dante, for example, only saw Beatrice twice in real life, yet she inspired him to write the “The Divine Comedy.” He never had time to know whether she ground her teeth when she slept, who her favorite painter was or even her middle name.

Had it happened today, Dante could have snagged Beatrice’s digits in a heartbeat, and that part of the story would be over. There must still be some sort of obstacle, I thought. If there isn’t an obstacle, how is romance going to survive?

Maybe love isn’t going to last for long. Because it’s easier, we have the opportunity to know too much about it. We can date earlier, so many of us know premarital sex — there’s no mystery there. We’ve been broken up with, fooled around with and stalked by overly sentimental exes. We’ve tasted every type of fruit, and it’s making us nauseous.

Unwilling to believe that love is on its way out, I stayed after class to talk to Satyavolu. I asked her whether there are obstacles now — challenges to overcome. She hit the nail on the head: “Cynicism,” she said. “Cynicism leads us to create our own obstacles — through infidelity or reluctance or saying ‘I’m not ready for a relationship.’”

She’s right. Just think of the statistics we read daily in the media — that one in two marriages end in divorce, for example. Or that 51 percent of women are single, as The New York Times reported in 2007. Even if the reports are inaccurate, even if not everyone is getting divorced or dying alone, we still know that love is, above all else, risky and impermanent. We’ve experienced the risk and impermanence for ourselves.

“And all those experiences make us cynical,” Satyavolu continued. “Which is the greatest obstacle to overcome. People have this idea that romantic love is for everyone. This is not true. But the people who overcome their cynicism are more likely to find true romantic love, to open themselves up to the possibility of it.”

I asked her why — with everything we know about love failing and ruining our lives — we would want to overcome our cynicism. Maybe we’ve learned not to open ourselves up for a reason. Maybe cynicism is just an evolutionary tactic to keep us from getting hurt. In the meantime, being cynical doesn’t stop us from finding companionship in friends or making booty calls when we seek company between the sheets.

“Love is altruistic,” Satyavolu said. “It is sex and it is companionship, but it is more than that — it is the greatest thing because it also involves giving more of yourself than you can ever give to anyone else, more than you can give to a friend or your parents or children.”

“Love gives us the chance to go above and beyond the basic call of humanity,” she said.

Odysseus didn’t cross the ocean because he wasn’t getting enough attention from the women he met. He wanted to pay attention to Penelope. Same thing with Dante — he had plenty of saints to distract him in heaven, but he followed Beatrice through it all. Romeo and Juliet, even though they were pretty extreme, transcended their survival instincts because love provided the opportunity for something beyond their everyday existence.

I know it’s corny, but the more I think about it, the more I feel the tiniest of hairline fractures cracking my cynical shell.

Write Caitlyn at cac141@pitt.edu.