What happened to love?

It seems that these days more and more people claim to be wanting love but when you get right down to it they don't know what love even is. So I ask.. What is love? Is love pain? Is it truth? Is love simply a word or is it so much more then that? To me love is everything, the pain and truth in our lives. Love isn't just a word to me. Love is life. Without love where would we be? What would become of us? Would there even be an us? People say life is complex and filled with emotion. If this is true then where did these emotions come from? Love. Without love there is no hate. Without love there is no peace, and without peace there is no war. Love is the epitome of life. Now the sacredness of love has been tarnished. Tarnished by the cheap thrills and instant gratification of life. Love which was once the most simple yet complex thing in the world has turned into just another word. Not just any word though, one of the four letter words. Love has turned into a bad thing. If you're a man you're considered too macho to feel love. Men run away at the thought of having to actually tell someone they love them, or they lie, and tarnish the word that much more. Women have to live life afraid to tell someone they love them for fear that someone will leave. What kind of world do we live in where love is such a bad thing? How did we go from love being the one perfect thing to love being the worst thing? It saddens me to think that we live life everyday preaching about this or that but no one ever talks about love, or the lack thereof.

On a similar topic, marriage and love. What once was the perfect joining of two things is now a blemish on the face of society. Marriage is looked down upon by so many people. When did this happen? When did marriage become a leper? A pariah to society. In this world of internet dating, 24 hour wedding chapels and other such nonesense, have we lost sight of what helped us become who we are? It wasn't wars and it certainly wasn't one night stands. It was love, marriage and straight up morals. Now our morals are gone and our sense of marriage is skewed by celebrities and pop culture. All we see are celebrity break-ups plastered on the front page of every magazine and I ask myself, "Why? Why do we glorify divorce like it's some damn miracle? What's wrong with marriage?" All I can come up with is that today people view marriage as prison and being single as freedom. If this is the case, why get married at all?

Lastly I need to bring up fidelity. When our parents were kids infidelity wasn't talked about. It may have been practiced but never discussed. Now it's a topic for several household conversations and talk shows, all we hear about is so and so cheated on what's her face. It makes me sad to think people are dropping themselves to that level. Whoring themselves out when they have someone at home waiting for them. It isn't even just the physical act anymore though, now it's spread to the internet. Where you can meet someone and fall in love as fast as your modem will allow you to go. We live in a world where no one talks about emotional cheating or how the internet is tearing apart relationships one by one, because if it's online it's "okay". Infidelity isn't anything more than a person's inability to be pleased. So again I ask.. Why? What's wrong with one person? What's wrong with settling down, committing? I don't understand why we have an insatiable need to keep searching, to look for someone else, like the person we have isn't good enough. Then to feel the need to lie to that person, as though you know what you're doing is wrong but you "can't help it". There's no reason to get married, to break someone elses heart, when you know you won't be able to stay faithful to them. Like it's their spouses fault they're unfaithful, like they were never the cheating type before. Like there's some sort of void in their life that their spouse just can't seem to fill. With love in a marriage infidelity is simply a vicious rumor on the lips of the cynical.

With that I will finish but with one final question. Where have the love, honesty, loyalty and above all else, our morals, gone?