Loving True Love
Today's Teens Want the Real Thing
John Meroney
January 1, 1998
Is romance among young singles in the nineties dead? A "decade ago, famed philosophy professor Allan Bloom suggested that if romance wasn't dead, it was certainly on a respirator. In The Closing of the American Mind, his report on the country's intellectual and moral climate, Bloom wrote that his University of Chicago students rarely said "I love you," and never said, "I'll always love you," to each other. Perhaps, he argued, this is because young people are honest. They really don't experience love, and are too familiar with sex to confuse the two. It was, he said, a generation so preoccupied with its own fate that it would never fall victim to the selfless fanaticism that characterized the great love affairs of old. "Relationships," not love affairs, are what they had. Studies of students in the eighties show he was probably right. Traditional courtship—dinner and a movie for two—was a rarity; "pack dating," where groups of people gathered for social outings, seemed to have replaced it. And until recently, many studies showed that young people were waiting longer than ever to get married. It makes sense that those who found themselves confronting a grown-up world with unprecedented domestic dissatisfaction and record-high rates of divorce weren't exactly enthusiastic about traveling down the same road as their parents. But now, ten years after Bloom's obituary on love, evidence seems to suggest that the cynicism once expressed by young people has been replaced by a strong and resilient desire for love and a traditional family. Just last summer, New York magazine reported that young people seem "flagrantly optimistic" about marriage. An issue of the Cassandra Report, published by the twentysomething research firm Youth Intelligence, ...
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