I MISS THE OLD WAY

I miss the days when we have that analog kind of courtship.

 

Courtship really involves a lot of risk. Those days were home-based phone are "uso" and the guy will muster his guts to call the girl with the thought of the father's grilling may happen with 80% chance of happening. After a couple of minutes of polite conversation with lots of "po" and "opo" the poor boy with beads of sweat will finally say "May I speak to your daughter?"

 

Thankful for the birth of pagers. We managed to find ways to send a message first before calling to make sure that we are one step free from gate keepers that may answer our phone call especially those suitors who had always been grilled everytime he calls you. The relief he may feel that he has the mean to pass-by any gate keepers (mother, father, portective older brothers). But even though it was a direct means of reaching the girl you fancied, paging still involved effort. All that memorization of pager numbers. All that repetitive dictation to operators who weren’t all that fluent in English. Not only did they have to listen to thousands of lovesick teenage boys spill their guts to the object of their desire, but they sometimes got the message garbled, and often in embarrassing ways (a pre-cursor to auto correct?).

 

Courtship nowadays involves all-too-direct text messages, and impersonal, all-too-convenient chat applications (WeChat, Line, Kakao Talk, BBM, etc.). How easy, how effortless, how un-risky. How blah.

Mix tapes with the ever famous Side An and B with a few silence in between songs. Then a couple of years later, CD burn replaced it which is a lot easier. Nowadays, nothing beats Youtube wherein you can directly copy and paste the link you may want to share to your object of affection.

Copy, paste, and voila! You are done. That's how modern the way of courtship is nowadays....

 

I miss the days of analog romance.