My son is currently down in the dumps after his girlfriend of over a year broke up with him. It was unexpected -- for him -- for us, the older folks in his tribe, not as much of a surprise. They've been trying to maintain a long-distance relationship, with her still in high school and him 200 miles away in college, for the last four months or so, and it's clearly taken its toll on their togetherness.
We middle agers know from experience how difficult doing the long-distance thing can be, even once one is well into adulthood and can commute to see the significant other on a regular basis. Most of us tried to do it once or twice, and most failed miserably.
My last long-distance relationship was when I was in my 30's, and while it was doomed to failure for many reasons, the long-distance aspect of things definitely hastened the demise of the whole thing. He got a job in the bustling borough of D.C., working for the Bush Administration, and I lived the rural life of a primary school teacher in the Central Valley of California. Clearly not a recipe for success, despite having everything else going for us. We couldn't even meet halfway, because, really, neither of us would have wanted to join the other in their life, or meet (geographically anyway) in the middle, probably somewhere in Kansas, which we often joked about. It just couldn't work.
For young people, who have never lived without constant contact with each other, it's even harder....which is kind of a quintessential example of irony, isn't it? Despite the ability to be in constant communication with your significant other thanks to texting, sexting, and Smart phones, relationships still can (and do) end because of the miles between you. Technology means nothing in the face of what the heart really wants, which is having the one you love right there, right now. In person. No substitutions accepted.
I worry sometimes that maybe this next generation is going to be socially crippled because they have no chance for reflection in the spaces between the togethers in their relationships. We had them. We'd talk for several hours on a date, but then we'd be out of contact for another day or so, maybe more. And in those hours of aloneness, we'd reflect on how the relationship was going, who the person was we were involved with, and where we thought the whole thing was going.
It's ironic that my son's girlfriend broke up with him after a weekend of (relatively) no contact. He was working and could not chat at any length for about 48 hours or so. I think that's when the illusion of togetherness probably ended for her, when in actual reality she'd pretty much been alone for four months already. Kids today are never alone in one way; they can text people 24 hours a day and fill their hours with typed conversations. But in another way, they really are alone, if they are sitting in a room by themselves to do it. They just don't know it.
Today's phone technology creates the illusion that there really is togetherness when, in reality, it's just you and a screen. If this new technology actually worked, i.e, really did improve the quality of their interpersonal lives, their long-distance relationships would be the proof of it -- they'd fare much better than the ones of our generation did. But instead they're worse, because all that immediate-gratification technology creates a believable illusion of togetherness. But what the brain sees, logically, the heart isn't buying in on for one second as it sits in a room alone.
The fact is, technology is just NOT enough to satisfy some of the most basic inter-social human needs we have -- for companionship, leadership or love -- and is just one more example where over-reliance on technology will fail us, as it has done in so many other areas.
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