I don’t get why it’s so hard

@ViciDraco Great response.
But I wonder when we became so emotionally fragile that we won't risk anything. Life is just as much pain and hurt as it is pleasure. Do you think social media is having an affect?

@Magenta P.S. Or do we think and expect love to be just a feeling? Because that defo is a recipe for failure.

@Magenta I think social media is a factor but not purely to blame. There is a whole host of reasons, some are very valid and important to have and others just kind of suck that they exist.

There's the very real fact that social expectations have changed. It used to be that not being married as an adult was kind of a point of shame. Marriage happened early and young. Divorce was difficult and scandalous. Our social circles were small, the judgement of our neighbors meant a lot more to us. The legal challenge of divorce was more difficult than working out the differences. And so the social pressure to get married and stay with that person, happy or not, created an illusion that almost everyone was happily bonded to someone. As social circles widened, having to impress the neighbor meant less and we became more free to split and divorce. We began delaying marriage and dating longer. We began discovering incompatibility through the longer dating and thus split even easier because there wasn't a legal battle.

As you hear about more other couples splitting up, it puts that seed of fear in yourself that it could happen to you, which causes some barriers to go up. And that kind of creates a feedback loop. Then you have the economy. I don't really care which gender does what, but at one point one person managed most of the income and the other person managed the home. At the end of the day you came together. Nowadays both people work and then scramble to also manage the home. When it's time to come together the shared thread is exhaustion. And if you have different schedules, good luck even getting that far.

The work required to keep a bond strong, which you allude to by asking what I think love is, still remains. The social pressure, the time and energy, the trust that the other person is in it for the long haul and the effort is worth putting in - all of those factors have eroded so much that the number of people who are unwilling to put the work in has increased. But they don't want be alone either, so they aren't going to advertise that they are unwilling to put the work in. And that again increases the risks for a person who is willing to put the work in. It's a bad feedback loop.

Social media takes all of that and just turns it up even more.