I wanted to write on the phenomenon of facebook for sometime but I thought I would be writing on ‘facebook phobia’ and relating it to my never-ending musings about ‘blog phobia’. However another point has struck me today. On facebook what you do mostly is to look at who has written on whose wall or commented on whose photo or wrote what message to which egg or plant or what not. After a year of facebooking I realised that a considerable amount of my female friends are, for all practical purposes, writing love letters to each other without the slightest a hint of self-consciousness. Actually, to be honest, it was Seda who brought it to my attention and she also said it makes her very angry. Let me try to explain what the situation is and why this angers my beloved.
These people use an exaggerated amount of terms of endearments when they address each other. They say things like: “my darling”, “my beloved”, “love of my life”, “sweetheart’, “I miss you so much I can’t breath” “I will kiss you until you are breathless”, “why don’t you marry me”, “don’t send that woman your love and kisses be mine and only mine”, “You are so sexy”, “you are delicious”, “you are scrumptious” etc. I think you get the picture. I am not sure if this is a Turkish thing or more universal or even if it is something specific to my group of friends. (though since my friends number smtg like 300, it is safe to say that this is not a specific group we are talking about.)
Now Seda is angry because she sees here an appropriation of love terms for smtg that is not a love relationship based on the firm belief that the usage of them will never be taken as such. For instance, in this blog, I keep referring to Seda as ‘love of my life’ and when I say this, it is to convey a simple truth (as simple as any truth can be) so when people who are only friends start using it for one another, without actually meaning it literally, they turn the very usage into a joke. And no doubt the assumption here is that it could never be taken literally and seriously because they are used, among women (heterosexual women to be precise though as you know heterosexual is never qualified) None of them would ever use such words for a man, and if they did it would be taken seriously, and if not by the man in question, then definitely so by their boyfriends.
At first I thought Seda was being overly sensitive but as time goes by and the exaggeration continuous I have started to see her point. I have a feeling they don’t use such terms to their boyfriends or if they do, they do it privately, not publicly. So either these terms have shifted in such a way as to apply not to love relationships but only to same sex friendships -in which case we should better find new ones for love relationships or soon there will be no love in them- or all these women are latent lesbians that have become symptomatic and very loudly so.
Umberto Eco said that in postmodern times you can no longer say “I love you” but have to put the declaration in scare quotes and say something like: ”As Barbara Cartland would say it: I love you”. I guess part of this situation is due to this condition. However when this inability to take declarations of love seriously because they have been used so much is canalised into same-sex friendship relationships I believe there must be smtg more at work. While I was writing on “Tipping the Velvet” I suggested heterosexual love has become an overused cliché and only lesbian love seems worth the bother of the romance writer. Outside fiction it looks as if heterosexual love is indeed dead and all is left is a mockery of love between “friends”. To put it in other words we have an exaggerated show of love with the possibility of seriously loving and, most importantly, making love nonexistent. And Seda is right it seems like our very serious love, that is no doubt a sexual love, is being belittled in the process albeit inadvertently.
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