MY FRIEND tells me I am a hopeless romantic. She claims that love is not an indescribable spiritual connection between two people, but rather a matter of mere compatibility. I should find someone who treats me well and has similar career aspirations. Wanting anything more, she says, is a naive desire I formed after reading "Romeo and Juliet" one too many times.
Which is partially true. I have read "Romeo and Juliet" - much too many times. But in an age where people change lovers as often as they do their laundry, I think we would all benefit from reading it again.
Our generation seems to be filled with people who do not believe in the possibility of everlasting love. That sort of love exists only on the tattered pages of a Shakespearean play or in the dark woods of a fairy tale.
People who hold this pessimistic outlook succumb to a self-fulfilling prophecy. When people stop expecting to find lasting love, they stop looking for it. They date just to date. Or they settle for someone who treats them kindly.
As a result, marriage has lost much of its sanctity. People may say "till death do us part" but they rarely consider themselves to be making such a commitment when they say "I do."
What matters to most is the here and now. If the marriage turns into a burden, divorce only requires signing a few papers.
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When individuals enter into a relationship without a real belief in the relationship's permanence, they find it easy to leave when problems arise.
As U.C. Berkeley Professor of Sociology Robert Bellah said in a lecture earlier this year, "Marriage should be a contract to enter into a non-contractual relationship." The ethereal bond of love is more important than upholding some compatible business-like relationship.
Unfortunately, fewer and fewer Americans adopt this attitude towards marriage. And as a result, America has a 50 percent divorce rate, a generation of children who have grown up without two parents who love each other and an entertainment culture that is way too focused on sex.
This is a quite a shame because the modern era is one of the few times in history when most people actually can experience long-term love. Most youths can be fairly certain they will be alive in 50 years. They also can be fairly certain the law or their dueling families will not interfere with their marriage choice.
Modern America is a place where we are given the opportunity to choose who we want to love. We have this choice in the fullest sense of the word - our marriages are not arranged and we are not forced into marriage for economic or monarchal reasons.
And the choice to love someone is made by independent and equal individuals. This is what makes it a real choice. Men look at women as more than children or sexual objects.
This mutual respect is a precondition for ideal romantic love. While the long lost era of chivalry may have had its charm, the modern era is the one in which love can carry the most meaning. Free from necessity and asymmetry, love can attain its highest form. Such a love entails two equal beings, who each find the other so compelling, that they desire to spend the rest of their lives discovering everything that they can about one another's character.
Yet many people's skepticism toward the possibility of a long-term love causes it to escape their grasps.
The freedom to choose brings with it a fear of being responsible for our own destinies. People would rather take the middle road, and settle for someone they are affectionate toward, than take a risk and continue to search for someone they truly love.
While people marry those who they find they are compatible with, are fun to be around or are "good on paper," their soul mates are catching a movie, reading in a coffee shop or volunteering at the local shelter.
Settling for anyone less than the someone you truly want to spend the rest of your life with is like deciding to watch reruns of "Three's Company" because you are not sure you can get tickets for a Broadway show.
That all great things require risk and great love is no exception. If you pursue your ideal love, you still might end up a heartbroken and alone bachelor or bachelorette.
But in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena ... who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place will never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
(Kelly Sarabyn's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kas7p @virginia.edu.)
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