The Current Discussion: For Valentine’s Day, this question: What is the future of love?
A beloved Brazilian poet, one of the composers of the song “The Girl from Ipanema,” Vinicius de Moraes, wrote in one of his most beautiful sonnets that love cannot be immortal, because it is a flame; but it has to be infinite while it lasts.
This is the perfect recipe: lovers have to believe the sentiment is everlasting even if it lasts only a single night.
Some romantics are mourning the end of love. They are wrong. Yes, the duration of the sentiment seems to shorten each day, as some bonds emitted by some unreliable debtors. But who cares about duration, if we can have intensity? A brief love is not a sub-prime sentiment. Actually, love can be on the verge of another dimension of its existence.
With globalization and at the edge of communications high-tech, humans can all be in contact with each other. We have never been so close. In such a connected world everything is possible, or every kind of love. Imagine if you live in Washington and, by esoteric chance, your soulmate was born in Somalia or in a small town in China, or in an Indian village in the Amazon. In the bad old days you would never have met. But now you can find your perfect partner just with a click on your computer. In this world where distance is dead, we are not confined to our nationhood. Even if some of us would never fall in love with a person we have never met personally, chances to love and be loved have improved. People from many countries are sharing the same space, the same city, the same country. We are in an age of cross-cultural love. Even if you are able to love only a person that doesn’t exist, you are not lost in this brave new world: it is enough to create fantasy character in Second Life and make it go looking for its “second soulmate”.
Love is gaining momentum. Lovers have never had so many possibilities to find their true love, in this six billion-strong community. Don’t complain about the short duration of current feelings. Love is infinite while it lasts.
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