It’s never been easier to be in a casual relationship with music. In the age of "try-before-you-buy", when almost every new release is at our fingertips to stream in full, we’re able to consume music without having to commit to anything except a few 30-second ad breaks. We’re in an age in which we aren’t looking for "forever", but for instant, intense gratification. It’s not just the way that pop songs are delivered that’s starting to reflect this—the songs themselves echo these sentiments. "Forever" is an outdated concept, at best.

Lana Del Rey’s "High by the Beach" is a prime example. The first single from Del Rey’s upcoming Honeymoon, the song is a kiss-off, a pre-breakup monologue. A romance is ending, but there’s no grief in the sentiment—rather, Del Rey is exhausted by the relationship she’s in and the idea that she’ll have to put effort into breaking it off: "Now you’re just another one of my problems," she sighs, asserting "I’ll do it on my own." She’s not afraid to be alone—actually, she’s exhilarated by the prospect.

-=-=-=-#iframe:https://www.youtube.com/embed/QnxpHIl5Ynw||||||

This is in stark contrast to the sentiments at the heart of 2012’s Born to Die. Those narratives deal in eternity as if it is the only option, a future cast in amber. Playing off the album’s twisted Old Hollywood aesthetic, there’s a sense that although we’re hearing about relationships that could easily have been formed over the less-than-poetic medium of the text message, in a time when it’s deemed romantic to watch your lover play video games, we’re in fact hearing the epic love stories of our time. "I will love you ’til the end of time," Del Rey croons in the chorus of "Blue Jeans", "I would wait a million years." It’s all very romantic, but there’s a clear sense of the macabre on Born to Die, where 'til death do us part doesn’t necessarily promise growing old.

Del Rey has always thrived on inconsistency, exemplified by her aesthetic as part-county fair beauty queen, part-Instragram celebrity, but there’s something unerring and decisive about the new direction she takes in "High by the Beach". There’s no romanticism in her dismissal of this relationship as suffocating. When she decides in the song’s outro that "through the fire we’re born again", any concept of "forever" that remained is torched.

Del Rey isn’t the only artist abandoning a legacy built on a promise with no foreseeable breaking point. Taylor Swift’s first notable entry into the pop charts was a song that changed the ending to the world’s most recognizable tragedy to accommodate "forever", but on 2014’s 1989 she upends this notion. 1989 documents a doomed-to-fail whirlwind fling, where "take me home", "we were built to fall apart", and "nothing lasts forever" are the prevailing romantic sentiments. There’s no sense that this relationship is any less meaningful, intense, or worthy of mythologizing. It may be that in order to truly crack mainstream pop, all Swift needed to do was abandon her banjo. However, perhaps a way that she has been able to infiltrate the lives of so many more young people is through her understanding that popular culture has become oversaturated with representations of unrealistic relationships. As more and more young people begin to reject the idea of the long-term, monogamous, heteronormative relationship they’ve been so conditioned to seek out, so too do the figures they look towards to dictate what’s important in the modern cultural narrative.

The trend away from "forever" reaches beyond chart-pop. Mac DeMarco’s Another One is a mixtape of melancholy, a matter-of-fact meditation on "forever". The record is the most consistent of his career, sonically and thematically, as each song evokes the everyday ebb and flow of a modern romance. Here, the first-person narratives don’t address a "you", but rather a "she", as if he’s discussing the fate of this relationship over the cup of coffee he promises his listeners at the end of the record. "Will she find love again tomorrow?” he asks, then answers "I don't know/ I hope so/ And that's fine by me."

"Still Together", from 2012’s 2, uses the same form of address, but instead asserts that "we’ll always go together." DeMarco’s girlfriend, Kiera McNally, is a steady feature in his touring party, accompanying him to press events, and is a part of the mythology that surrounds his public persona. Their relationship is somewhat anomalous: she’s not a celebrity girlfriend whose personality fans might have already been invested in, but through her inclusion in DeMarco’s narrative, fans value their relationship. DeMarco routinely points McNally out in his audiences, a practice that reached its logical conclusion when he performed "Still Together" with her on his shoulders at 2013’s Pitchfork Music Festival. It’s the most concentrated form of PDA possible in pop music. On "Let My Baby Stay" from 2014’s Salad Days, DeMarco muses that for all he knows, the day his lover leaves him could be on its way, and the songs on Another One deal in realistic musings on inevitable expiration dates.

Jenny Lewis’ The Voyager works similarly, relying on realism over wishful romance. On "Slippery Slopes", Lewis says, almost surprised, "I’m still into you, dreams really do come true," promising "If you don’t wreck it, then I won’t wreck it either," and deciding "I want eternity." There’s a pragmatism to this particular forever, as Lewis considers what the concept means when you’re on the road. On "Love U Forever", there’s a sense of impermanence, as the hook isn’t a promise, but rather a guess: "I could love you forever." There will come a time when "all the polaroids fade," when this forever will be called into question.

This tendency toward the skeptical, toward being un-idealistic, feels grounded in a genuine cultural shift. As the lives of musicians become so easily accessible through social media and constant touring, their humanity is emphasized: if they’re just like us, so are their relationships. This isn’t to say that "always be my baby" and "I will always love you" aren’t sentiments that will return to the pop cultural landscape, as trends rotate and repeat. Realism in pop music might be on its way out any minute now—after all, nothing lasts forever.