Have you ever looked at the phone screen and giggled and blushed (or if you are a man, looked like a chump for about five seconds, before retreating into stoic silence)? Of course you have.
You have seen funny forwards, and crazy emoticons and hilarious tweets and laughed and blushed and caught yourself grinning and blushed again.
Do you have any idea how pretty you look when you do that?
You know who knows that? The person who sits next to you at work (or they just think of you as cuckoo), and the aunty standing next to you in the train, and the coffee shop waiter whom you the ask the wifi password while you wait for your date to arrive.
You know who does not know how pretty you look? Your date. That guy whom you watsapped with all day and know to a T which emoticon he will use with which lame pun. That guy has no idea what you actually look like when you say this “:/”.
In fact, he does not even know what your ‘meh’ sounds like.
And this is why you will never fall in love. We will never fall in love. We will be always be left waiting for our knight with the shining screen. The guy who swyped us away with his words and his ability to google quickly. That guy who we talk to all day, but have nothing to say to once we meet because it’s all out there anyway. I miss the days of our collective youth when you met people to actually catch up and did not use humanoid illustrations to express yourself and if you wanted to talk to someone you picked up the phone and took a leap of faith and called. You did not send a solitary hi into the world without any defenses and hope for it to elicit response, while drifting off to sleep on a slow moving timeline.
I miss the process of falling in love. It’s all too safe and time lapsed and grammatically correct now.
Look At This Tangle Of Thorns 
I know less about being in love than … any man on the planet, but here’s my issue against blogposts that go on about how twitter, or chatting, or whatever are taking away from the spontaneity of connections and meeting up in the ‘good old days’: People do still meet to catch up. People do still take a leap of faith (on the other person and the god forsaken Vodafone connection) and call someone they want to talk to. The fact that now they have the option to send a solitary ‘Hi’ is just something that makes the possibility of an initial connect easier. The fact that people can dress up their tweets, make them grammatically correct, and immerse them in the zeitgeist of cool, (or, indeed, write faux introspective blogposts, or involved comments thereto) is no different than any other peacock-using-its-feathers-to-attract-a-mate act that we used to do. The thing is, all of that is the gloss. The heart of any starting out relationship is, is no different now than what it used to be: Can you engage each other strongly enough, for long enough or can’t you. You’ve started out after half a dozen tweets favorited, a dozen faltering DMs, and whathaveyou. You want the online interactions to be minimum after that? You get to do that! And many people do it. You get to decide what your ratio of interaction over meeting:phone:chat is going to be with every person. Use it to connect initially, then make it as non time lapsed as you like.
You (and I mean ‘you’ only in the generic person sense, and not you specifically) will not fall in love because you’re generally a vapid, shallow, self-involved, self-obsessed, self-centred, narcissistic, solipsistic, sorry excuse for a human being. And so am I.
*slow clap*
Beautiful rebut. I understand what you mean as well. But even though the means of communication makes it easier, it also lets us hide our true selves for longer, and by then we are mostly past the stage of being able to be honest. Hence, relationships between two made up people, which don’t translate to anything deeper.
SO true! You’re like my mind-twin ‘ 😛 ‘
Haha! This is true for most people.
Can’t keep it off..
“We will be always be left waiting for our knight with the shining screen…” #clap
Good read. “..while drifting off to sleep on a slow moving timeline.” This part was too good! 🙂