By Sophie White, News Correspondent
Whispering secrets when your faces are inches apart. Feeling your bare feet touch underneath the bed sheets. Knowing what someone smells like when they wake up.
Romantic, right? Too bad the only musty morning breath I recognize is that of my best friend. She listens to me when I cry and tells me I am beautiful. Sometimes we even share milkshakes and stare deeply into each other’s eyes across the straws. And the person I’m hooking up with? He knows what I look like naked. I don’t even know his major, but there’s that. Now who would you say I’m more intimate with?
The intimacy equation is a new conundrum of the millennial generation. Nowadays we have exchanged not having to say anything to constant texting, the heat of someone’s hand to the glow of a computer screen. Being stripped now exclusively applies to the tearing off of clothes, and not the state of pure honesty from one person to another. Whatever happened to not just being inside people, but knowing them inside too?
Answer: the cell phone.
I love my iPhone -– despite harboring a semi-abusive relationship that involves occasionally throwing it against the wall. I’m so textually active I’m shocked I haven’t contracted any SMS-TD’s. But the technology that comes along with our favorite hand-held devices (and I’m not talking about battery-operated, personal massagers) has been slowly and sadistically killing the small semblance of romance that collegiate life has to offer. Gone are heart-to-hearts opening your soul up to another – now you don’t even need to hear someone’s voice to have a conversation via text. Instead of seeing each other naked for hours on end, we send Snapchats to get off on carefully manicured photos that only show up for a few seconds. People sext about wearing Victoria’s Secret and rubbing chocolate on themselves while sitting on the couch in sweatpants. There’s a disconnect.
Even though we are constantly connected to one another with today’s technology, there is actually a distance between people in sexual relationships. It has created a world of manipulation that has made a farce out of a bond between two people that is supposed to be about honesty. You wait a few minutes or hours to text someone back to seem more aloof. You relay every word of a text conversation to your friends to get their input. You plan out every “if” and “the” in a text to convey the highest level of nonchalance. We all do it. We work so hard to make it seem like we don’t care, and it works – we’ve stopped caring.
Now don’t get me wrong, not caring about sex can be super fun if that’s what your heart – or, genitals – desires. If that cock-block Nemo taught me anything, it’s that not getting some simple loving when you want it is the worst. But when the feet of freezing snow kept me from getting hot and heavy, I realized that my booty call doesn’t mean very much to me – yet I’m willing to do so much with him. As a result of the technological interactions explained above, we don’t even know the people we are having sex with. How is it that you can get as close as you possibly can to someone physically and yet feel like there are things you can’t say to them? (Or should I say, things you can’t text.) We’re hiding behind a phone grasping for the only intimacy our generation knows.
We deserve more.
It’s not like I want to role-play Bella as my Edward stares at me through my window in the name of romance. (Next column: the severe issues of our current romantic role models.) I just think we should know each other better, in ways that electronic devices can’t convey. We should know the electricity you get from looking at someone you like and feeling it surge through your body. Liking someone and wanting to be intimate with them requires person-to-person chemistry – not dexterous thumbs.
