The future of Romance...???

In one of my favorite movies "The end of the Affair" the main character is a writer... He said something that made me think: "Pain is easy to write. In pain, we're all drably individuals. But what can one write about happiness? "So it's easy to write about pain, because it inspires writers and makes them more "poetic".
It's not the state of bliss that writers talk about when telling us about a love story... It's rather the struggle and the pain BEFORE you reach the "Happily Ever After"... Love stories are rarely a description of how "happy" couples are.

So i started to think about love stories that I’ve read... and love songs that i grew up with... I noticed that they all had one thing in common: The sense of longing... the anxiousness of wanting to be with the person while you're apart...etc...
This NEED is i guess what inspired these writers, and they in turn shaped what we know about Romance...
In Arabic, the word i'm looking for is "Herman"... which kind of means deprivation...
(Herman is especially what inspired most of the Arabic love stories & poems I’ve read...) anyway....

Stories like Romeo & Juliet shaped the way we view "Romantic Love"...
Cinderellas Prince was so desperate to find her, that he resorted to her foot size as his guide!!!
"Romantic Love" is largely based on this struggle... it focuses on the suffering u endure when you're apart............ So i started to think about what technology changed when it comes to Love.
In the old days, you couldn't email each other or talk on the cell when you miss each other...
If lovers were apart, they would have to send letters with couriers, or with pigeons! and that took forever! so they were forever in pain and forever thinking and longing, until one of them dies! (and one of them always died cause no disease had a cure in the old days...lol)

So all that brought me to thinking about the future of relationships... and the future of Romance...

What's interesting is that we (our generation) lived in that world (to a certain extent)
Ok, we weren't using pigeons to communicate, but i remember having to wait by the HOUSE PHONE while my parents are asleep so i can have a private conversation with a boy! The process of getting to know the other person took forever cause you couldn't reach them all the time... Especially if you have conservative parents, or if you were living in a gossipy my-big-fat-greek-wedding style environment...
In those days, there was much more distance, so there was more time spent on missing the person then actually being in touch with them.... so every "crush" and every relationship had a slow pace... Not being so reachable kept that "spark" and made relationships last longer.

We don't live in that world anymore!

Our children will never experience this... they will always be a touch of a button away from those they want to reach...
Relationships have become very quick... they start and they end in a glimpse!
Sometimes i observe my single friends and i think: "Going fast is probably a good thing cause who has time to waist... no one is getting any younger...etc..."
but then again: Are couples becoming so close so fast, that there is no where else for the relationship to go but downhill?

Fast food, fast lives, and fast Romances...

And when you have just started dating, why wait for Saturday night to show off your new hair style, when u can email your boyfriend your new look as soon as you leave the hairdresser?
Why does he have to wait till he sleeps over to see you in your nightgown when u have a webcam in yourbedroom... right in front of your bed......... u can see where i'm going with this......

So how much room is there for desire???
Longing to hear the persons voice, for example, no longer exists... cause even if u don't call each other, u can always leave voice messages!
How much can u really miss a person if u have there picture on your MSN and your mobile and your desktop???
There is no waiting for scented letters to arrive in your mailbox... Instead, there are emails, most of them short...... You might never know what your boyfriends/girlfriends handwriting ever looks like?!? lol
Even flowers & chocolates have become virtual...

I was thinking about what my kids will say when i tell them that i grew up without a computer!? (and without the Internet! and without Satellite TV?!)
Definitely when considering the educational & informative aspects, they would feel bad for me and my generation, cause they have and advantage that we never had when we needed to do research, or when we wanted to know more about the world...etc........... but when it comes to Romance, i wonder if they would pity us, or envy us?