PUBLISHED ON FEBRUARY 15, 2014
PROVIDED BY CNNNEXT.COM
"Last week the New York Times ran a column by a Towson University professor who believes Gen Y has lost the ability to love.
Andrew Reiner begins by quoting a study that seems to contradict his thesis: A majority of millennials, 61 percent, intend to marry someday.
"Yet for all of their future designs," Reiner frets, "many of them may not get there.
Their romance operandi—hooking up and hanging out—flouts the golden rule of what makes marriages and love work: emotional vulnerability."
What evidence does he present that millennial relationships entail less vulnerability than the older models? Ha, evidence.
Please.
What we have are unsubstantiated phrases: a "blithe attitude about marriage, perhaps even about love"; "a generation that's terrified of and clueless about the A B C's of romantic intimacy," the "most elemental skills" of which "are going the way of cursive handwriting." Reiner makes the obligatory nods to social media—Facebook "trivializes the complexity of romantic relationships," he says—and to drinking and to hookup culture.
Oh, and he notes that self-esteem levels are on the rise, which somehow correlates to emotional immaturity, which means romance is doomed because only perfectly emotionally mature people fall in love."* The Young Turks hosts Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian break it down.
*Read more here from Katy Waldman / Slate:
www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/02/11/have_emotionally_absent_tech_addled_millennials_lost_the_ability_to_love.html
