The Sad Truth About Modern Day Relationships And Why They Fail

Welcome to the age of uninnocence, where relationships are as dispensable as Kleenex tissues. You use and throw them away when they have soaked up your mess. While this simile may sound harsh, it is not necessarily meant to be negative, and may instead signal a progressive attitude towards the freedom of choice. 

I sometimes find it hard to reconcile these two worlds. The first is the old world's charm of innocent romance that I grew up with. In this scenario, falling in love was a gradual process; you got to know the other person and their imperfections and accepted them anyway. You recognized all that they were rather than all those tiny, annoying things that prevented them from being everything you envisioned in the ideal mate. Two people evolved with each other to find that key balance of how they could fit into each other's lives regardless of the circumstances.

© Thinkstock/Getty Images

I was lucky to witness the peak of this idea of romance in my early 20s, and safely cocooned by its existence while I figured myself out. I could have held on to this notion while it was still prevalent, and while love still existed in its now primitive and almost extinct format.

Instead, I find myself grappling with the new age concept of relationships, fast-moving swipes in a sea of seemingly eligible options, only to discover that eligibility does not always equal availability. Given the shiny and seemingly flawless façade of a life manufactured by Instagram-edited stories, we have gotten so used to everything being picture-perfect. This sets up high (and often unrealistic) standards for the ideal job, the perfect house, and the faultless partner. Consequently, if even one of these aspects is missing, our entire belief system is thrown into disarray, leading us to feel inexplicably disillusioned. Sometimes it feels like patience and compromise are archaic concepts, and it's easy to fall into this trap where everything is awesome, nothing is perfect, and very little will suffice. And while striving for perfection is important, in a world where it's all or nothing, I can't help but wonder, is being good enough ever enough? 

There are times when I flippantly blame technology or millennials for this trend, but if I'm being completely honest with myself, we're all equally guilty of perpetuating this cycle of dissatisfied contentment. If the goal of evolution as well as medical innovation (through procedures like genetic engineering) is to produce new and improved species, could it be argued that we are biologically programmed to seek this out in a companion as well? The truth is that we tend to take solace in knowing that we haven't yet settled for mediocrity, because something or someone better may still be out there. In that process though, it's easy to fall prey to the new-age ADHD of dating restlessness.

© Thinkstock/Getty Images

At the crossroads of this paradigm shift in the cultural conceptualization of love, it seems inevitable to break down this dichotomy. With modern dating, we can take agency in the compromise between indecision and choose from a plethora of options, in an almost eugenic approach to mate selection. We may end up with our soul mate, but we may also end up alone (at least we did it our way)! Do we embrace this change and move forward, fully aware of its possible repercussions?

or do we hang on to the shreds of a somewhat antiquated idea of relationships, acknowledging that others around us may not share this view (and that we ourselves may have evolved past it)? So, going back may mean giving up some of the progress we had made towards self-discovery and seeking a mate that matches this self-aware self-image. But it may also lead to 'settling' into a non-fairy tale version of happily ever after.

While it's tempting to paint these scenarios as two extremes, I don't think they are in any way, mutually exclusive. The happiest couples I know have found a way to navigate this exhausting process, and discover a happy middle ground. If there's one common theme across their success stories, it's that regardless of the way in which they met, they were open to love and stayed true to themselves in the process.

© Thinkstock/Getty Images

They found someone who seemed pretty darn great to them, even if they didn't check all the right boxes. Maybe, achieving that balance means defining our absolute limits and non-negotiables through careful self-discovery, but being flexible about everything else? As cliché as this may sound, maybe the key is stop looking for Mr. or Mrs. Right, and instead letting Mr./Mrs. Right-For-Me-Right-Now be a part of our world.