Love and Relationships; Paradigm Shift between Generations.

Love and Relationships; Paradigm Shift between Generations.

Communication has radically evolved over the recent years. I was born towards the end of the last century, a few years before ICT could rock our world. After 2000, I started to see a different trend in the world of communication especially in love and relationships.

Back in the ’90s, while growing up, communication was strictly letters and personal meet-ups. The idea of globalization had not yet taken root in Kenya and most African countries. This was perhaps because our ICT avenues were controlled by government policies that were either impervious to the truth of a rapidly changing world or ignorant of change.

Love and relationships back then were trails of real things. Strictly guided by a moral code of conduct. It was a masterpiece of art to watch or get the details of a love affair. Personal contact was true, focus was undistracted save for the shying of the girl to play with the flowers. After all, you cannot afford to ignore nature.

When your partner told you the next morning that they didn’t eat supper because they thought of you, definitely you could believe them. Again, because the meetings were the only means to talk at length and chat, the partners in question met more often and shared a lot hence getting to know each other very well. This could perhaps be the reason for their long and stable relations.

Today, one-on-one chats have been replaced by instant chats via social media. The worrying thing is that most of us are either not using social media well or we are being used by it. Nowadays if a girl tells me she didn’t eat supper because she thinking about me, chances are she ate a heavy lunch.

The contact between partners especially during the dating and courting periods has been replaced by social media. We only have some ideological knowledge of our partners. You chat over the phone or computer for weeks and get to meet once in a blue moon and proudly say we know who our partners are. Chances are we don’t know the real them.

Back in the day, dates were taken to the banks of lakes and rivers or the parks for walks. People got to interact with nature and that could be one of the reasons why they cared much about the environment. People could take good care of nature because it carried their memories and histories. Today, we take all dates into hotels and restaurants. Not that they are bad, only that we miss the healing in nature that cements love and relationships.

The lost touch with nature could be blamed for the don’t-care attitude we have even when we see encroachments. How sweet, however, it looks when you get an engagement proposal under a huge bougainvillaea tree. How sweet when you get told, “I love you” in the park or forest and the birds are there to witness and sing for you. Love is innate, more abstract than material. Unfortunately, more of those kinds did set in the past century.

love
The love of real flowers has been replaced by the love of plastic flowers.

What of letters? They were my favourite. Now that I never got or sent letters (you know I am lying), I only enjoyed sharing in the reading of those sent to my friends. You know the boys thing? Where we weigh the letter and tell you the standing of the relationship. Creativity was real and we could have had more poets in this century than ever had we taken that writing seriously.

When the phones and computers came, we took pride in the poetry of the days gone or those from our friends in the West. You know what? Emails are strictly office stuff. Phones are for chatting about everything and nothing specific. Saying hello doesn’t have to be a meet-up thing rather a Facebook or WhatsApp thing. See why things seem so cold?

I love the world that experiments a lot. We should let our girlfriends and boyfriends write us one lovely letter from their thoughts once a week or a month and mail it to us if we must use technology in love. In those letters, a few lines of poetry and art will be highly appreciated.

Let Facebook and WhatsApp be an update thing only. No more than 20 texts a day and we meet up as often as we can and share time with our loved ones. The rich understand what family means to them and that is why they set aside time to bond with family. The greatest gift we can give the people we love in this world is not texting them one hundred times a day but spending thirty minutes or one hour daily with them and letting them know we value them. That is the meaning of love.

Nature is our thing, let us take time to show love to our partners by sharing in the love of and for nature. Nature is a valuable resource we inherited and one our children look forward to passing on to their children too. If we take care of nature, we can take care of our families and relationships.

We are endowed with good things to help us develop and take our love and relationships to a whole new level. How we use ICT, especially in the social media segment determines how our families fare throughout the ages.

Copyright 2017.

Geoffrey Ndege

Geoffrey Ndege

Geoffrey Ndege is the Editor and topical contributor for the Daily Focus. He writes in the areas of Science, Manufacturing, Technology, Innovation, Governance, Management and International Emerging Issues. For featuring, promotions or support, reach out to us at info@dailyfocus.co.ke
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