Along with the death of literacy, romance is going with it; this is something I’ve noticed as a seventh-semester English major in the School of Education.
Something about literacy that most people get confused by is that it doesn’t just teach you how to read but rather teaches how to feel in great detail. It helps you understand the difference between wanting someone and needing them, and because people are reading less, emotional fluency disappears.
Romance is confusing and new for everyone, whether you are a senior in high school entering your first long term relationship, or a senior in college re-entering the romance scene after years of being in a committed relationship. Romance is complicated. Romance is complex. But that is where literacy comes into play to help mitigate that complexity.
Welcome to Chill Pill, a biweekly column featured on Fridays about slowing down in a world that rarely lets us do so as college students. Here, we will talk about balance, burnout and the small things that can make college life feel a little less overwhelming.
Romance requires empathy. Empathy requires imagination. Imagination requires language. Language requires reading.
You can’t write your partner a love letter if you’ve never read one. You can’t describe how you feel if you’ve never seen it described. So, pick up a book. When you don’t read books, you start to lose the ability to analyze subtext. You start to miss the plot twist in real conversations. The ability to read the room slowly decreases as you lack the practice of looking at a narrative and figuring out what is happening under the surface. And if you can’t parse out the hidden meaning in a stance, how are you going to decipher whether someone is playfully flirting or trying to escape the conversation?
We see evidence of this everywhere; look at dating apps. We went from using pigeons to send love letters to Hinge bios that say, “I’m figuring out my relationship type.” That isn’t romance or flirting; it’s linguistic laziness. If your vocabulary is limited to emojis and internet slang, you are lacking the tools needed to build actual connection.
Now we can take a step back from romance and look at flirting specifically. The best flirts are those that are very witty, fast and understand subtext. They know how to engage in banter, giving replies that move dynamics further. Flirting isn’t overly aggressive or sexual either. The best lines make you pause and think. That pause requires nuance, which is lost on the people who need everything spoon-fed to them. I blame that on the decline of literacy.
Often, you flirt with someone and they hit you with the “Wait, huh?” You know what, never mind.
The decline in literacy isn’t just worsening TV shows and movies, where the plots are predictable, but it is also ruining the art of flirtation. So here is your prescription for this week: put down your phone and read something with actual paragraphs. Read poetry, a bad romance novel; just read something where characters use their words to express their desires.
Expand your vocabulary so you can express your feelings.