Shakespeare is right even in these days of Twitter and text messages – the course of true love never does run smooth, as seen from testimonies in one of the largest US dailies.
ONE woman relates how she would get a tattoo after each breakup. It is “pain therapy” of sorts for her. Another confesses that she left her boyfriend despite his being a loyal partner.
Then she was smitten by another guy who was scheduled to appear in a new reality show. In her zeal to win his love, “I made myself too available”. In the end, she lost him as well. These are all real life accounts of “love in the new millenium”, as writer Daniel Jones puts it. And love is just as fraught in this cyber-age of Facebook, iPhone, Twitter and e-mail.
“But the ways of finding, keeping, losing and talking about love has changed,” Jones notes. “Now, technology is so overwhelmingly a part of dating and mating, it’s hard to think of what we did before. And there’s a casualness about love and sex that seems more pervasive than ever.”
A college student, 21, wrote that the cyber-age is “where hookups are just a Craigslist ad away and the game has evolved to the point of no rules. For my generation, friendship often morphs into a sexual encounter and then reverts to friendship the next day.”
Jones has seen, or rather, read many of such cases. He is the editor of Modern Love, a popular Sunday column in The New York Times, which features contributions from people about love or longing.
The stories are not all about romance. One man talks about appreciating a difficult mother, a “drama queen” who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Another guy broke up with his girlfriend of five years but still “spied” on her on Facebook and got upset when he discovered that his grandfather had befriended his ex on the site. That, he felt, was a betrayal.
Modern Love has been under Jones’ charge since it started about six years ago. He gets essays from around the United States from “everyday people”, from high school students to grandparents.
“I receive about 300 submissions a month,” Jones says in an e-mail interview. The column invites frank, personal testimonies on families, relationships, dating, parenthood or any other situation that is considered contemporary love.
Jones, 47, has lost count of the stories that touched him. But, he adds, his job becomes even more compelling when he comes across “a smart or sensitive new voice”.
“I do get worn down by material that’s subpar for whatever reason, or by reading the same situation over and over. But a great piece can make up for it.”
He has his own love story to share about his wife, the author of My Sister’s Bones and Sweet Ruin.
“She and I met when she visited my graduate writing programme in Tuscon, Arizona. We got to know each other through letters for several months until we were able to meet again and see if we actually liked each other in person. That was before e-mail, 20 years ago.”
They have a daughter, 15, and a son, 12.
Jones believes that modern tools in the 21st century have made communication easier “but the work of love, and the awkwardness, seems to remain much the same. People still get hurt, dumped, and heartbroken, and always will. Your Facebook status won’t shield you from that. Neither can iPhone or Twitter.”
Take, for example, how a woman described being told by her husband of two decades that he does not love her anymore: “His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch,” she wrote.
People now have practically limitless choice when it comes to finding love, or so it seems, with technology and social networking, Jones says.
“We used to be somewhat limited by locale, job or school, or to those within a certain circle. Now that has been blasted apart, and we can find love anywhere. But greater choice comes with its own hazards and the expectations can be kind of paralysing – there’s a feeling that there’s always someone better out there.”
For those who are married, it has become easy to look up old loves and re-connect.
“This fuels fantasies about ‘what might have been’, and in many cases, these late-in-life reconnections are destroying marriages.
“With this ease comes complication. Ah, the wonders of technology!”
Jones, who grew up in Pittsburgh, is based in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is the author of After Lucy, a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and the editor of an anthology titled The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain their Feelings about Love, Loss, Fatherhood and Freedom.
Although most of the contributors to Modern Love are females, Jones says there there have been more male readers than he expected. Modern Love has become so popular that a selection of the essays has been compiled into a book titled Modern Love – 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit and Devotion.
Jones, who has sifted through tens of thousands of love stories, remembers October 2009 as being his best month.
“I just loved all the four essays (for) that month,” he says. One of the stories was submitted by a man who said he had become a better person and a more loving partner to his companion after getting a dachshund as a pet. In a Valentine’s Day article this year, Jones wrote: “Will love always be this strange? You’d think by now we would have an iHeart app that takes our quivering insecurities and converts them into kilowatts that can be sold back to the power company.”
But unfortunately, we don’t, as he well knows.