Love in the modern era

O and I have been together for 6 ½ years and in that time we have seen some pretty big leaps in technological advancements. I went to University 10 years ago and took with me my very first mobile phone – which I mainly used for phone calls to my parents. I don’t think I sent my first email until I was at University either.
O and I would not have got together without the assistance of text messages. I got horribly drunk and made a fool of myself, using this as an excuse, I got O’s number from a mutual friend and text an apology which sparked a text conversation which led to a date and the rest as they say is history. If we had got it together a year later we would have probably communicated via Bebo before graduating to Facebook and then Twitter.

When we’d only been together for 5 months I left him with his studies and I spent two months travelling across Canada. We communicated and kept our relationship going through email and the occasional text, we literally didn’t physically speak for two months. When we started going out we didn’t talk on the phone very often at all. O still is scared of the phone – he hates talking to people he doesn’t know very well on the phone. He says it is because he can’t see their facial expressions so never know what they are really thinking.

I didn’t date much in high school and I was thinking the other day how difficult it used to be to talk to boys! Because you literally had to ‘talk’ to them, you couldn’t just text, poke or tweet them. You had to endure the awkward pauses in conversation where you desperately tried to come up with something witty. It took O and I a long time to get together and without text messages it would have probably taken much longer. What would we have done while I was in Canada?

Don’t get me wrong I love receiving letters through the mail (especially those that aren’t from the bank). I’ve still got all the letters that my family sent me during my first year at University. But now life is all about text messages, emails and for me blog posting. I still send O at least 2 texts a day and if he worked at a computer it would be a lot more emails. It is the instant thoughts that I want to tell him about and don’t have the patience to wait until I get home (plus I forget). Life is about instant communication, but also about thought through communication, you can take your time when responding to an email or text to make sure you really are letting your wit and brilliance shine through. Rather than in telephone conversations with boys where you just had to go with the first thing that came into your head. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about these things anymore.