Are the norms of relationships changing?
As a little girl I grew up being told that a relationship is between a man and a woman. I was taught that once you found the right person, you would be happy (almost) all the time and you would eventually get married and have a nice long life until you’re both wrinkled with grey hair.
However, the older I became the more these words started to sound like an anomaly. I finally came to the conclusion as to what was wrong: like many things that evolve in our society, the idea of relationships has changed as well.
Popular songs like “She Knows”, “These Hoes Ain’t Loyal” and “Paranoid” are only a few examples of how this generation, not only promotes cheating, but ingrains and normalizes
it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ll rap the entire song “You Was Right” with my friends in school (after school hours of course), but that only shows how cheating is becoming a normality. Now let me explain why: In the article “Are the Media Creating a Generation of Narcissists” by Dr. Jim Taylor, he explores how much the media is involved with the overall behavior and moral compass of today’s youth. Taylor writes, “One obvious place where young people are learning about narcissism is from popular culture. A study by the celebrity psychiatrist Dr. Drew Pinsky, in which 200 “celebrities” (I put the word in quotes because the bar for being considered a celebrity is set very low these days) completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, found that they were significantly more narcissistic than the general population.”
Although the study that Dr. Pinsky performed only targeted “celebrities”, we must take into account the immense amount of people that watch, and to a degree, imitate these celebrities. As I was often told, when around young children, “watch what you say because they’ll repeat it”. This too may be true for adults. When reading the article “How Children Learn by Observing Behavior of Adults”, Eliza Martinez,