In
this day and age, courtship has become a relatively easy endeavor. Boy meets
girl, girl meets boy. Boy and girl exchange cell phone numbers. Boy and girl
text, call each other. Go out. Go steady. Relationship established, presto.
All it takes is a few hundred or thousand pesos worth of prepaid cell cards
or phone bills (depends on how laconic or verbose you are) and you get yourself
a steady date, or boyfriend or girlfriend, whichever term you prefer. Bottom
line is, things have change - a lot.
Things always change, of course, and it's been decades since a man has had to
fetch water, chop wood or build fires for his beloved's family. But with the
dawn of communication technologies, many avenues for connecting have been opened.
You can now meet the, "One" via chat, e-mail or text. Not
to say that meeting through mutual friends, letters or phone calls (landline)
no longer happen.
Personally, I think our
generation has had it easy when it comes to wooing our adored ones. Text and
chat are non-face-to-face communication. Facial expressions, sweaty hands or
fidgeting fingers can't be seen. And if the wooing was nipped in the bud or
has suddenly gone sour, you can vent you frustration by choosing, "Erase"
to delete the concerned party's cell number (this you might later regret).
So when an admirer asks for your home phone number and later, your home address,
this may be considered a great leap forward, especially if the poor one has
been, "admiring" you through text alone (in which case the admirer
might also be cost-cutting since gas and landline phone bills are sometimes
cheaper than prepaid cell cards). When the moment comes, take heed, you might
be in for some serious winning-over.
Text, e-mail, chat - sure it's convenient, sometimes practical but we may have
just been taken over by this deluge of technology, in which case our other faculties
might suddenly rebel and go into atrophy. But let's face it girls and boys,
in the end, there's nothing better than Touch, Feel and the sureness and stability
of Physical Presence.
Tina P.
