Love in the time of social media

This article is part of the TNGG Sex Week series on Gen Y and sex. Read more from the series here.

When I started researching this blog post, I realized that we’re not sexual revolutionaries. This is a generation of cultural sophistication. We’re the iPhone 3GS. Not breaking new ground, but maturing and perfecting that which we were given.

I think that we pride ourselves on our openness to sexual experimentation and freedom. But really, all our weird sex stuff has been around forever. Forget the 60s, John Wilmot was writing about dildos in the 1660s. Look hard enough, and you’ll find that it wasn’t just Marquis de Sade, but a whole bunch of others as well, getting freaky in ways that you wouldn’t expect.

This is not to say that we—the golden, the aware, the online—haven’t contributed much to the sum sexual knowledge and experience of humanity. Quite the contrary. We’ve given more than our fair share. It’s just that our revolution hasn’t come about in the million ways (whether it be sweet or disturbing) that people have sex. Through open discussion, we have changed the way people think about fucking.

We have friends with benefits, faux-fuckbuddies, just dating or seeing each other partners, exes. Every permutation that involves emotions and orifices has a specific word to describe it. For better or for worse, this is the biggie. This is a good thing, because it lets us articulate the set of expectations we have in the sexual social contract. This is also a bad thing, because most of the time, someone or the other rushes in like a fool and can’t help falling in love.

We have more freedom to go into whatever sort of relationship with whomever we want. As a result, we spend more time defining and analyzing the various aspects and ramifications of romantic and sexual relationships than any other generation in history.

And we’re honest about it. Most social networks allow you to define several stages of your relationship, the most dreaded being Facebook’s “It’s complicated”. As a result of having historically unprecedented ties to our communities, transparency is inevitable. Me, I think it’s wonderful that we can articulate that it’s human to have non-soulmate needs. We admit when we’ve made a mistake, pick ourselves up, post some “saddy poo” status updates and unsmiley tweets, and get back in the game.

When that happens, we have self-help books, social media, E/N forum posts, and hugs from understanding friends (both in the physical and in the metaphysical online plane) to help us through our suffering. We unabashedly talk about our needs. And sure, these needs are often confusing and ambiguous, as complex human emotions tend to be. But instead of joining the French Foreign Legion or worse, we focus on the problem at hand and deal.

The public airing of love affairs also gives us great freedom. When everybody’s mistakes are out in plain view, our own horror stories become simple facts of life. We don’t just gain context for ourselves—we learn not to judge others, because we see how universal their actions are. How like our own.

Author: Arafat Kazi – I dropped out of college, almost died of typhoid, and now I’m back in school. I play drums and read detective novels.