Who was it that said love is a many- splendoured thing? Come on, I should know this one. I've been inclined to say it was William Shakespeare, but I guess it's instinctive to credit any catchy one-liner to the great gay wordy one.

Everyone has their own mushy little candy-floss idea of love [When I mean love, I don't mean the 'love your family and cherish God and all things and love your friends and Jesus loves you'; kind of love. I mean specifically the kind that happens between one person and another person in a purely romantic sense. In fact, sod it, substitute love for romance]. Some will dream of it, some more 'privileged' ones get to enact it in a broad act we term 'romance'. From the realist's point of view, romance is basically nature's way of getting our body of energy to court another body of energy to create another similarly-formed bundle of energy hopefully some way along the line. To most people, it's a thing to enjoy while it is there, to love and cherish the person dearest to their heart, and forever go around with this person by their side, till the day they wrinkle into lovable old people and end their days together as one.

This is, of course, true. If you happen to be living in the 1950s. These days the idea of romance is so blurred one cannot help but disparage it. To me, love romance is the most cynical, unrealistic, in-the-clouds form of human emotion as can be expressed today. I'm not saying this out of spite, I love and have loved before. The thing is with the advent of today's 'millenium culture', there is really very little to be said about the purity of loving romance, other than the fact that it just doesn't exist anymore. It's a purely non-existant thing and it's wishful thinking that any of us who don't exist in Amish-like sequential, disciplined and traditional seclusion could ever maintain it.

The thing is these days there are too many complications. Political correctness has a lot to explain for this. These days a guy can't just sweep a girl off her feet and start a relationship which can idealistically last forever. These days a guy must make 'considerations', emotional physical and mental considerations before he even thinks about going near another girl. A girl must think about 'treasuring her dignity', 'is he the right man', 'can he support me'. In many ways, I think a girl's considerations are a lot more valid. Now I'm all for the treasuring of dignity. Maintaining one's dignity [and let's not confuse it with pride, that's the thing that makes guys with big penises deliberately sit naked in the sauna] is what everybody should live for.

A guy these days, gets nervous around the thought of courtship, so they resort to all sorts of messages, some subliminal, some obvious. And these days, you have to use messages because both sides feel simultaneously insecure. These days a girl has to flirt to 'gauge her man'. A guy has to be a smooth talker. A girl must send all sorts of teasing signals to see how responsive the guy is. A guy must know how to shave and dress and be fashionably astute and always have a cool one-liner ready for all occassions whether it be to liven up the social function or placate the heartbroken female. And the main reason why we are all so insecure about the other person, I feel, is because of the proliferation, of sex.

Say what you will about sex, it's a pure act of ultimate love between a man and a woman, or bringing into consideration homosexuality, between the same gender. The fact is that sex these days is impure, overused, overrated and totally not what we all think it is. Sex these days is girls dressing up in a piece of cloth that leaves nothing to the imagination, gyrating shamelessly to music which more often than regularly only adds to the situation, in the hope some big hulking hunk of muscles will come along, rub his crotch all over her, and drag her off to some God-blessed bed somewhere where he will have his way with her, often repeating the process with assorted guys or assorted girls several times in a single night, every weekend of the month and every month of the year.

It cannot be denied, sex has cheapened, and this is as much the fault of the ideologies of the current generation as it is anything else. For guys, the idea is they just want a place to stick their dicks in. For girls, they want to be that place. I've overheard people boasting they got laid three or four times in a single day. While of course it is naive to think this hasn't actually been happening for a while, it's pretty obvious this advent of sexual 'liberation' has only turned the way it did over the last few years. The music these days for a large part preaches nothing else. Singers, male or female, have to gyrate and swirl their rear ends around and pose in revealing or 'hip' clothes with some weird face which looks half-starved, half-looking to be bashed in and frankly retarded on their album covers if they don't wish to flop on their record sales. Ads don't sell products without some skanky-looking woman [imagine why a young woman would endorse a 4x4 pick-up truck or a men's shaving cream and you get the idea of how pointless this is]. All this does nothing but contribute to the idea that sex is available, is everywhere, and everyone is willing to give it and take it. So while people go about the nightclubs and discos screwing around like jackrabbits, when the time comes for them to get serious about a relationship and drop the slutty shit, they go all insecure and go 'Aaah I need to preserve my dignity. I'd better make sure he/she's actually not half mental in the brain and full-mental in the genitalia'.

When you think about it, of course people are going to fail in relationships. Of course they're going to turn into debacles. Because, really, these days, everyone expects sex. It's that simple. Everyone is so half-crazed on the dope that is fornication few people think of little else underneath the 'nice-sensitive' facade. Because everybody's done nothing but screw around for the last ten years, or expect to screw around, when it comes to the time for people to get serious and stop mucking about, do you really think any person is going to stop? No wonder everybody's minds are twisted with the questions of 'Could I really expect better from this or that person?'. It's because we put ourselves in this situation that we've ended up mistrusting everyone else.

Even more paining, most people just don't give a fuck. Actually, wait, they do. In fact, they do little else. But seriously, so many people just don't care. Guys are content to find cheap holes to stick their wangs in, and girls are content providing. These people are content to drift along, getting laid weekend after weekend, providing no direction in their life whatsoever, and hoping that maybe, just maybe, someone or something might just drift by. This is the hallmark of what I call the 'jellyfish people', people who do nothing but drift along in any form of their life and are content to snare whatever suits them that passes by. These people provide no push or impetus to their lives, and are ruining it for the people who do. It's these types of people who have ruined love, have ruined life, and have put the world in a situation where it is for the most part, pointless, cynical, and without direction. Forgive me, all those out there who actually do love for love itself, but to my mind, there is no valid romance left in the world, there is only cynicism, pointlessness, and people looking to fuck. Bless us.