Currently, the world of dating is confusing and complicated. Love is no longer just based off of a mutual emotional bond or caring for one another; it has become a game of who cares less and who needs who more. Sometimes it's even will you make my ex- jealous? Do you look good in pictures?

This is normal to me, a 17-year-old boy trying to figure out how to make a girl swoon. To my father, a 52-year-old man, that's not love. If you ask my grandfather how he loved my grandmother, he'll say she was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. That true love made his heart skip a beat and that's what love is. Being so taken back by someone you forget everything for a minute. I believe he's right.

If you speak of love to any one over the age of 30 they speak of movie dates and walking to your door with flowers to bring you out. Fast-forward to present day and you get that "I'm outside" text, and girls brag if their boyfriends give them flowers once a year. Modern love is played, where that old-fashioned ideal seems to be the "happily ever after" and chivalry we're all chasing after; we're running away from love.

I don't expect a musical number and to start singing out of no where, but I do want to change the way love is perceived.

If we recognize that we don't love as much as our parents did, maybe we can change it. Maybe the divorce rate will drop if you start to mean it when you say "unconditional love" and you stand by someone's side. Unconditional means even when they cry, scream, lose their mind, you will love them. When it's not easy to love them any more, you choose to keep loving. Let's bring that kind of love back. It shouldn't be just hopeless romantics who write letters and buy roses and compare their lovers to poetry.

People say our generation is sick, which is true, our mental illness rate is grossly high, but maybe we wouldn't be so sad all the time if we learned to love each other, maybe the anxiety of never being enough would fade if people learned to stop cheating and put all your effort into one person instead of a little effort in three people. Maybe there are so many unhealthy relationships because people have trust issues from never being loved right. Then again, maybe I'm crazy and too much of a hopeless romantic, but I'm hoping I'm right. I'm hoping.

Love isn't a lost cause. There are still stories to be written about the heart-racing feeling you get when you find the "one." So let's stop playing and start loving again.