Love Ya

By Richard Wilk

It is February and it’s the month of love. This concept of love is largely propagated by the store created holiday for the meandering mindless masses: Valentine’s Day. It seems that love has become a buzzword thrown around more than a football by a quarterback in the Super Bowl. Because of this, the very word love has become cliché and has seemingly lost much of its once cherished value. More over when people do set expectations for love, they base their beliefs on what they see in ‘chick flicks’ like You’ve Got Mail and The Wedding Planner where the men are expected to be ‘perfect’ and despite all the emotional trauma that the women subjects the man to, he still is hopelessly obsessed with her. With all this devaluation and over expectation it is no wonder that modern day love has been degraded to nothing but a grotto of moral depravity.

Teenage girls are perhaps the worst of perpetrators of both devaluating love, as well as setting outrageous expectations for it. I cannot go a single day without hearing at least ten freshmen girls in the halls pass their friend and rattle off the words, “kayloveyabye.” They throw around the word love more than their boyfriends. Many such women are also under the impression that they can treat men in any manner they choose and still have that guy be hopelessly infatuated with them. By infatuated, I mean spend a huge amount of money on them. They believe that just because Meg Ryan or J.Lo did it in a romantic comedy, that it must be true to life.

I’ve also noticed that the word ‘love’ is associated with anyone teenagers have any kind of association with. They tell friends that they just met five minutes ago that they love them. What should be realized is that teenage girls go through friends faster than Chinese food works its way through one’s intestines. They don’t feel ‘love’ for those people, but they use the word. This leads to the word being randomly thrown around and when the word is actually used its value is much depleted. Love takes time to develop. To believe that you can love someone at first meeting is preposterous.

More over, this love concept has been over promoted by religious organizations with all that you must “love thy neighbor” stuff. I despise and loathe my neighbor. Who could love someone who’s children throw rocks onto your balcony and frighten your dog? Or perhaps they mean that I should love humanity. People can’t just love everyone and anyone. It takes time for anything resembling love to develop and somehow we are supposed to love people who we have no association with. People need to earn respect, and love can’t develop with out a sense of respect first.

The closest thing we have to true love today is a couple that has been married for sixty- five years. With today’s high divorce rate, one is forced to question if ‘love’ is really possible for many people. It can be observed that the words, “I love you,” are can be used as great tools of deception when they come from the lips of a person looking to trick the money from their unsuspecting prey.

In a world where the idea of love has been run over by the media, and the word itself has lost much of it’s value, it’s no wonder that we are an emotionally depraved society. Many people show no qualms about playing with the emotions of others and some even take delight in it. Perhaps one day when the word ‘love’ has lost all its value what so ever, and it no longer exists then we will be able to progress past this problem, but until that day comes, I’ll be forced to deal with freshmen girls in the halls whose only defining characteristic is their ability to quickly say, “seeyalaterloveyabye.”