It is common to read and hear complaints about today's youth, about their poor intellectual training , their fragile habits of work, their difficulty in committing themselves to major, high-flying endeavors. However, it is difficult to find positive evaluations of all those areas in which today's young people are far ahead of previous generations, particularly their parents' generation.

I am not only referring to the fluency that many of them have with the English language or the mastery of technological tools, but above all to the development of the virtues that favor harmony and social coexistence. It seems to me that it can be said that today's young people are kinder, friendlier and more welcoming than their parents, who perhaps belonged to a more rebellious and angry generation. To verify this reality it is enough to look at the usual conflicts between members of the political class and the general disinterest of young people in these battles of "their elders".

A distinctive feature of today's youth is their gregarious character and their taste for the masses. Today's young people are not independent, but tend to act in group. They like crowded discos and crowded bar terraces. For them, "to be normal" is always to act like everyone else. They hide their personal differences because they need to be accepted by their peers.

Today's young people are nostalgic about friendship. They want to have many good friends, although they are not sure how to achieve this. They like to have friends and simply be with them, because "that's what friends are for". The success among young people of social networks such as Facebook is impressive: it is a way of sharing interests - photos, music, hobbies - and establishing communication with other boys and girls who, moreover, have little to say to each other: it is enough for them to be connected. A young Peruvian girl to whom I gave some class has me in her network of friends, of which we are 1,200 people. Can anyone have 1,200 friends?    

Those who claim that relativism and postmodern skepticism reign nowadays are talking - it seems to me - about the parents of today's youth, not about the real young people between 18 and 25 years of age. Today's young people - a valuable studentwarned me - are rather neo-romantic, preferring feelings to reason, sweet caresses to conflict. I had never heard this expression used to characterize young people, but it seems to me to be a real good one. Our young people are romantics: they do not want to change the world, they are content to love and feel loved.

They live in the present and say they do not want a wife or a husband for life: it is enough for them to have someone with whom they feel comfortable because he or she treats them with tenderness and respect. The sexual sphere reflects these changes to a large extent, since sexual intimacy always ends up echoing what is happening in society. While their parents may have been advocates of "free love" or "love for life", now young people defend sex as an affectionate expression of tenderness, without any commitment. The new romantics do not want lifelong bonds, nor do they want responsibilities.

What strikes me most is that these young people are totally against promiscuity: they consider it totally unacceptable for a girl to "date" two guys or for a guy to cheat on his partner. Young people see no difficulty in sexual relations as long as it is for love, but they have a deep aversion to sex for money. Newspaper sex ads are not made for young people. This youthful neo-romanticism gives much food for thought, because so much tenderness without commitment is doomed - it seems to me - to a terrible loneliness.