I’m not sure how to respond to this. If I were to respond directly to your topic with my opinion, I’m afraid that I might inadvertently poke a sore spot. Has someone hurt you by making comparisons between yourself and another person, making you think that you wouldn’t be attractive enough? That someone can also be yourself.

Attraction, and even lust, is about much more than just physical appearance. Also, what is visually appealing to one person can be appalling to someone else. On top of that there is also chemistry, and on top of that, other emotions that you feel towards the person you find attractive. It’s a combination of our own history and our mutual history with the other person and our own ability to feel a variety of emotions.

I do not know whether social media keeps us emotionally immature, or simply makes us more aware of how immature we really are. Our society keeps changing, but our basic needs stay the same. Easy access to porn is not a replacement for intimacy, and I think that even those who are addicted to porn would know that. I think that we all desire to have an intimate connection with another human. Creating that connection is easier for some people and harder for others. Our brains develop all the time, and depending on what kind of relationships you had as a child, you may find it easy to have deep emotional connections with other people, or you might find it exceptionally hard. Not everyone is willing to work hard on healing and developing what was left underdeveloped. But I digress…

Healthy relationships require healthy people. What is healthy and normal for each individual, varies. I personally am sexually attracted to men who exude a certain masculinity. I also know that the masculinity comes with interest and appreciation towards females. If a man isn’t interested nor attracted to women, then it causes my own attraction to drop. So if I want to be in a relationship with a man I am sexually attracted to, I need to accept the fact that he is appreciative of femininity in general. If I were to expect him to be only appreciative of my curves and nobody else’s, then I would be neutering him and thus making him unappealing to me. But…that is just me, and that is just one part of the whole equation. To be appreciative, to be attracted to, to have sex with and to be in love with are all different things. What constitutes betrayal within a specific relationship depends on that relationship, but it should be communicated. If you think that the other person should not even look at others, and your partner thinks that it’s perfectly natural, then it will lead to a disaster. However, what your personal inclination is is also firmly tied with how honest you are with yourself and how confident you are about who you are. Even the most sexually open-minded person can feel threatened if they feel insecure within a relationship.

So, emotional maturity (your own and your partner’s), authenticity, confidence and trust in oneself and the other are all requirements for a truly healthy relationship, regardless of what is happening in the society.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 7 months ago by The Ruminant.

Every generation is going to have its own unique challenges as it comes of age. I don’t believe that technology is all bad or all good, but merely a reflection of human complexity.

People often look at today’s challenges and bemoan, how can youth possibly survive this? We survive it the same way we have for thousands of years. For as long as there have been human beings, there has been lust, cheating, immaturity, and faithlessness. But there has also always been loyalty, patience, honour, and love. Even our grandparents suffered heartbreaks and relationship tragedies, they didn’t need an app for that. It’s all part of the human condition.

Knowing the nature of a person before marriage.

Hi VK,

Thank you for starting this discussion wondering about technology and relationships.

To The Ruminent, thank you and high five if I could for putting in very clear words what is necessary for a good relationship.

All, imagine what it must have been like when the telephone became popular! 🙂

Big blue

• This reply was modified 10 years, 6 months ago by Big blue.

I can agree with you to an extent. Having barely missed Sunday church for almost 25 years, I have been indoctrinated to finding this current generation extremely antagonistic of my morals and virtues etc. Since I stopped going about two years ago, I’ve been pretty demoralised by dating relationships but not friendships. Absolutely every girl I’ve been interested in and started to advance some form of relationship with (perhaps about 5) have all been so vapid and capricious. I can deal with obsessions with social media and find no real gripe with allowing them to infiltrate our lives as new and diversifying ways of communicating and interacting, but it’s also created a popular culture of narcissism and various other self-centric tendencies. Again, this is completely fine, it’s just that every single girl has been like this and unfortunately for me this translates in an absolute need for instant gratification, affirmation, and validation. Two of those five women ultimately needed to have sex with me for them to accept that I truly did care for them. It was demoralising and sad. I’m a highly sensitive guy who, through church and a traditional moralistic upbringing, have become fairly old-school when it comes to dating. I take things incredibly slow. I’m respectful, caring, and utterly enthralled in the lives of the women I’ve dated (apparently rare for my gender) and yet all I get back is second-place to their own obsession with ‘self’. I guess, as others have already said, it’s a product of this changing global society. I’m just so cut sometimes when all the girls I’ve progressed things with over the past two years have been so coldly incapable of reciprocating old romance, or even worse, incapable of being receptive to it.

I distinctly remember what my most recent interest said to me when I bought her flowers for no reason: “Oh… I’m pretty sure this kinda thing’s just for Valentine’s day, but thanks. So do you want to fuck tonight?” :S

Hi
I made some serious mistakes in my youth and paid a heavy price for them and so did my children.
One must know oneself before marriage so they can judge someones hidden sins rightiously before hsving sex.
Sex is an emotion that can tempt the devil, it is not love and can ruin lives.
look around at the problems in marriages and lives and see the truth for yourself.
madera

I agree with Jasmine 🙂

What occurred to me was that we could change the topic of sex to food and have similar problems and arguments. How can anyone stay lean and healthy in a society where there is such easy access to fast food? What about the consequences to relationships? Is it appropriate for someone in a relationship to eat a lot when they feel stressed out or emotionally neglected, and as a result gain weight and place their health in jeopardy?

It’s natural to seek blame elsewhere when something hurts, but aren’t we all still responsible for ourselves and our own happiness (and health)? Ultimately being lazy and greedy and overindulging oneself does not bring happiness (quite the opposite) and people will find that out for themselves sooner or later. We could try to forcefully prevent them from finding that out for themselves, but our desire for freedom is so great that we would gradually go back to a situation where people want to be free to self-destruct, if they so wish.

I bet people haven’t fundamentally changed. If someone would’ve offered a human living in the Paleolithic era the chance to sit inside, eat burgers and fries and watch porn, they would’ve taken that chance. We evolve constantly and so do the problems that we face, and we will adapt and find solutions for those problems, until we yet again face other types of problems. People probably will want to have simpler lives in the future, but it will take us time to get to that stage, and when we finally arrive, we’ll have whole new problems to deal with.