An old school romantic in a Tinder world.

Last night wasn’t a sort of eye-opener for me. I guess I have opened my eyes for a while now. You might be wondering in which sense? Literal – even my readers possess the IQ to not debate – with the human eye being open for near about 14 hours hours daily considering the number of naps we have to take and 28,800 times we need to blink to keep our eyes lubricated – so, figurative it is. Well, you see, off late I have been keeping my eyes literally open for long hours beyond normal biological clock as my figurative eyes have opened – which is on the fact that love in our generation, literally, sucks.

Our generation’s love sucks in the purest way that strives to show that its impure.

I belong to a fairly conservative family whose level of conservative-ness has gradually receded over the years to beguile me with why they were conservative at the crucial start because by the time I rebelled out of their reigns and they had accepted love as the best way for them to go scot-free from the responsibility of searching a groom for me – I realized that now when I have the liberty to choose a guy of my own liking – Pyaar ka fashion hi aur nahi raha?! Like what?

From Jagjit Singh’s Hosh waaalon ko khabar kya bekhudi kya cheez hai where Aamir Khan gets happy with one glimpse of Sonali Bendre and stores her scarves I landed in a world where the guy says, “Hey babe, send nudes”? Dafuq

Love has become dating. Love letters had become sexts. Guys could waste months of your time and say all the brightest things in the world, just because they had That kind of time. In a world where you could set your settings to the number of kilometres you were willing to travel to meet someone, it was hard to expect commitment from a guy who had left and lived 1534 kms away no matter how sweet the beginnings had been – after-all even if I deny, didn’t we belong to this generation? Our previous generation obsessed over fast food, in our generation we have given up on fast food to stay fit but use these fit bodies to indulge in fast love. Its almost poignant how shabbily we treat our bodies these days and judge others who don’t do it. When I was a kid I thought you meet someone, like him, then love him and eventually marry him someday. When I grew up I realised that you meet a lot of guys, like a few, commit to none and probably marry someone completely different someday. How was it working out for my mental health? Terribly, I would say. Also, not just mine, even the girls I am close to. It’s such a terrible epidemic. I don’t understand – have guys become that desperate? Or have we girls created such a culture where guys took us for easy jerk-offs. Because everytime I log in to Facebook in five messages I receive proposals and desperate demands to be in a “casual” relationship. What is a casual relationship, anyway? How do you set the bar to casual or serious? Do you just click some emotional switch and turn it off so that you would feel enough to be with someone but not to ever want to be with them for long!? like how, how does this really work. I can never decipher.

There are times I wish I could go back. Time travel maybe. To that bygone era where romance still existed. Where you used to be happy with a glimpse of your love. Where you spent hours writing the perfect love letter wanting to expressing your feelings, not send dozen texts to dozen girls between the time your girl who you are “committed” to slept and woke up. Where you felt butterflies with holding hands, not jumped into bed at first sight. Where you got goosebumps at her every hi, her every text; weren’t so numb to casually sext. Where you didn’t reduce people to swipes. Where you didnt tick on a checklist of casual or serious from the beginning to make a person decide if they could be with you. Where you didnt flirt with everyone because love was a feeling you felt spontaneously not an item on a checklist of things you must do in life, like in these days; because in our time people are so afraid of commitment that they glorify one night stands, live in and no strings attached to hide the hollowness they substitute as love while getting into one relationship after the other. I want that old school love.I want the previous. The era that has slipped out of people like me because we are born in the wrong time.

For I feel like a misfit. I feel like a Jagjit Singh song, an AR Rahman musical, an Agnee song in a Neha Kakkar, Shirley Setia or Badshah playlist. I feel like an old school romantic in a Tinder world.