The Impact of Gender Equality Movements on 21st Century Romance

     Falling in love and being in a relationship with a significant other has always made the promise of being an adult look alluring. Being kids and watching the concept of love and marriage around us, a large number of us may have looked forward to “golden adulthood” when we, like the adults in our lives and in romance movies will also find the love of our lives. If you are like me, you can attest to the fact that when we eventually grew up, we realized that we may have viewed life and adulthood through rose colored lenses. Unfortunately, some of us may still be on a frantic search for the love of our lives with very little luck so far on finding them.

    Love and relationships are hard enough to maneuver without the burden of being a 21^st century youth trying to navigating the world. The political, social and moral view of the world has shifted quite a lot and as a result, the world of romance and love has been affected by all or some of these new ideas. A couple of decades ago, the world of love and romance was way different from how we know it today. Therefore, in recent years, we have witnessed how the standard for romantic relationships has been toppled and reconstructed over and over again. In the wake of the initial social equality movement,  the different waves of feminism and gender equality movements, the world has found itself having to reconstruct male and female gender roles as it pertains to heterosexual relationships and marriages.

    While a large percentage of society still retains the notion that gender roles and responsibilities are to be upheld as part of a societal institution that works and has worked for centuries, a sizable number of our society, especially the younger generations do not believe so.  As major pioneers of 4^th and 5^th wave feminism, discussions and debates are regularly held on social media and in person about the pros and cons of gender roles. Arguments surrounding gender roles and its shortcomings initially emerged as an attempt at feminists and women explaining how gender roles limits and contributes to how society views them which in turn leads to how they are being mistreated in domestic, social and work spaces. This has also led to this sort of reasoning being called out as confused and unfair since it can be also argued that women benefit from these gender roles. Some perceived advantages of upholding gender roles for women were identified as; women being exempt from fighting wars, the ability to marry higher than their social and economic station whereas men hardly could do the same and other perceived advantages of femininity that encourages chivalry.

    This has led to a back and forth between what is expected and what is allowed in romantic relationships. A couple of decades ago, romantic expectations for both genders were very limited and clear cut. Men were expected to love their partners by serving as financial providers for their partners. Women were expected to assume nurturing roles in their relationship dynamics. However, following continuous gender roles scrutiny, it was established that social expectations from women such as cooking and cleaning, being subservient to their partners, maintaining sexual innocence while their partners were not expected to and so on counted as ways that promoted oppression. As a counter argument, it was also established that if women did not want to perform roles cut out for them, they should be satisfied with not benefiting from this system at all, since they claimed it was oppressive.

    Whatever we have learnt of romance, love and relationships is a reflection of what older generations showed us. These love habits are assuredly intertwined with traditional gender roles. As a generation that holds constant debates on the dismissal and endorsement of gender roles and expectations, navigating love and relationships without it has become a tough ship to steer. Despite the rise of dating apps, romance movies and what looks like a constant rave about sex and relationships on the internet, it has become obvious that in recent years, the quality of romance has seriously dwindled. Studies have shown that over the last decade or so, the number of people going into new relationships have reached a significant low. A quick examination of society will also show that the duration for a lot of romantic relationships and marriages seem to be getting shorter.

    While it does not fully account for declining number and quality of romantic relationships, becoming hybrid romantics has made it harder for us to get into and sustain romantic relationships. Hybrid romantics is a term I coined out to refer to a generation of people who are stuck between traditional idealistic notions of love and modern notions of romance; who have not fully broken out from the old and therefore cannot fully embrace the new. Who are the set of people that fall into this category? Almost all of us.

    We have been taught by older generations to practice love and romance differently based on our genders; how we should show love and be romantic in the traditional sense of it has been restricted to being male or female. For ages, the role of men in romance has been predominantly financial. We can see this by how the idea of loving and being romantic to a significant other as a man is tied to how much you can provide. This can be in the form of buying gifts, expensive vacations or anything that would involve showing love by doing something that would show how much you can provide. The way society worked, women pretty much needed men to be sole providers for anything in their lives and the richer or more influential the man you bag, the higher you move on the social hierarchy yourself.  It usually had very little to do with manners, charm, how he treats women and many times even his looks. As women, our role in this relationship dynamic often involved submission and nurturing. We had to take care of and nurture our husbands and subsequent children. Our duties also involved submission and obedience regardless of the result. It was a system that worked for ages.

    However, in subsequent years, with the inception of gender equality and women now working for pay, the relationship dynamic has shifted a little. Since women primarily do not need men to cover their financial costs of living, being a financial provider is no longer the primary requirement to being a good partner. Having respect, being charming, similar life goals and so on has become the basics for a good romantic male partner. Being a good cook, a subservient woman and so on has long been the criteria for being a good wife. However, with the constant reversal of the gender role dynamic, less and less women want to occupy those positions in their romantic lives.

    Women now require their men to no longer just be financial providers but to actually be good looking, have manners, respect them as a person and so on. Men also still expect their significant others to be all round and unquestionably submissive and nurturing even though women now occupy other roles in society.  This unfortunately causes a major conflict of interest since this whole no gender role thing has not worked before. Society is therefore still learning to accommodate it. This firmly places us in the middle of the old and the new with us still trying to figure out how this “gender roles free romance thing” is supposed to work when what we have always known is different. This constant conflict of interest and confusion; “a who does what situation”, a “how are we supposed to act now situation” is the root of our romance crisis.

    While we would all want to create immediate solutions to our romance crisis, it is not going to be that easy. As the generation that has been in the fore front of many radical and social changes the world has been making, we automatically become lab rats to test all these social theories. Therefore, increasing the value of our relationships is not going to automatically get better just because we will it too. We are the default experiments for testing social theories on how future relationships will work and even if we want to, we cannot skip this crucial stage. The only thing left for us to do is constantly trying to make our individual relationships work in the best of our abilities. Try hard to love and not settle for what makes us too uncomfortable even if we are confused sometimes on what that is exactly.