New hurdles to love
By Bryony Gordon, The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2009
Published: February 13, 2009, 22:58
The other week I had dinner with a married friend in her late thirties. As is so often the case, conversation turned to the tragic state of my love life. “I don’t get it,” I wailed.
“I am young. I am vaguely entertaining company. I have a good job, all my own teeth and am in good shape. Why do my relationships never get past two months?”
“The problem,” she said, shaking her head, “is technology. I never thought I would say this, but I actually feel sorry for people in their twenties.”
Too much information
Ten years ago, she explained, when she met her husband-to-be, she didn’t have a mobile phone. There was only one computer that had email in her entire office. Facebook did not exist because the man who created it was still a boy.
“If I wanted to talk to my then boyfriend, I really did have to wait for him to call me. On my landline. At home. Sometimes, it would be a whole week after a date before we spoke again. The process was tortuous. But it worked.”
She flashed her diamond engagement ring and a 24-carat smile.
I contrasted this with my last relationship. We met at a party on a Friday and swapped mobile numbers. On Saturday, he texted me. On Saturday night, I texted him back and we met up and had a nice time.
By Sunday we were friends on Facebook and I had seen pictures of all his holidays over the past two years, plus childhood photos his brother had “tagged” him in.
He, no doubt, had seen the snap of me dressed up in a sparkly cowboy hat and a feather boa while at a karaoke night.
On Monday, through the power of Google, I knew that he posted a lot on internet messageboards about skateboarding. For a man of 31, this was slightly troubling.
Then again, the fact that I had been cyber-stalking him hardly painted me in the most flattering of lights. On Wednesday, we met for dinner and he started talking about articles I had written several years ago, thus inadvertently revealing himself to be a cyber-stalker, too.
On Thursday, I sent him an email thanking him for dinner. He never replied to it, meaning that our relationship had run its course in just under a week.
My married friend’s tales of life without email and text messaging may have seemed as alien to me as living in a cave — or through a world war, but clearly it was preferable — at least when it comes to relationships.
Advanced technology, while created by well-meaning people to help us, has only hindered my generation. It has so altered the landscape of relationships that it is now almost unrecognisable from what it was a decade ago, and all the worse for it.
Tangled in technology
Are dating websites a good way to meet new people, or just a giant online meat market? Are mobile phones a great way to inform a date that you are going to be late, or just an excuse to be flaky and cancel on them?
Is texting a useful way for the shy to ask people out, or rather an effective way for the foolish to send 18 missives in an hour to a paramour, thus making complete idiots of themselves?
Old-fashioned courtship has been replaced by some speeded-up version of romance, where relationships are as changeable as Facebook status updates or Twitter tweets, so transient that you can barely call them relationships in the first place.
“I think that there are benefits to it,” says Paula Hall, a relationship psychotherapist. “It expands the market for you and you can find out pretty quickly whether or not they are serial killers.
“But things can unravel very fast. You can discover that you get through your quota of text bundles in a week talking to a person, and that the only way to gain any mystery is by running out of phone credit.
"There is less space for personal reflection, and there is a danger that you make judgments based on what you see of them on the internet, rather than face to face.”
Technology has also more or less killed the language of love stone dead. A recent survey by the National Trust found that 62 per cent of us had never written a love letter, though the majority of us would like to receive one.
So what will remind us of relationships gone by 50 years in the future? A text that reads “I think U R Gr8”? An email from some Hotmail account we haven’t forgotten the password to? And could it be that the generation you’d expect to be having the most romantic fun might actually be the most miserable of all?
By Bryony Gordon, The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2009
Published: February 13, 2009, 22:58
The other week I had dinner with a married friend in her late thirties. As is so often the case, conversation turned to the tragic state of my love life. “I don’t get it,” I wailed.
“I am young. I am vaguely entertaining company. I have a good job, all my own teeth and am in good shape. Why do my relationships never get past two months?”
“The problem,” she said, shaking her head, “is technology. I never thought I would say this, but I actually feel sorry for people in their twenties.”
Too much information
Ten years ago, she explained, when she met her husband-to-be, she didn’t have a mobile phone. There was only one computer that had email in her entire office. Facebook did not exist because the man who created it was still a boy.
“If I wanted to talk to my then boyfriend, I really did have to wait for him to call me. On my landline. At home. Sometimes, it would be a whole week after a date before we spoke again. The process was tortuous. But it worked.”
She flashed her diamond engagement ring and a 24-carat smile.
I contrasted this with my last relationship. We met at a party on a Friday and swapped mobile numbers. On Saturday, he texted me. On Saturday night, I texted him back and we met up and had a nice time.
By Sunday we were friends on Facebook and I had seen pictures of all his holidays over the past two years, plus childhood photos his brother had “tagged” him in.
He, no doubt, had seen the snap of me dressed up in a sparkly cowboy hat and a feather boa while at a karaoke night.
On Monday, through the power of Google, I knew that he posted a lot on internet messageboards about skateboarding. For a man of 31, this was slightly troubling.
Then again, the fact that I had been cyber-stalking him hardly painted me in the most flattering of lights. On Wednesday, we met for dinner and he started talking about articles I had written several years ago, thus inadvertently revealing himself to be a cyber-stalker, too.
On Thursday, I sent him an email thanking him for dinner. He never replied to it, meaning that our relationship had run its course in just under a week.
My married friend’s tales of life without email and text messaging may have seemed as alien to me as living in a cave — or through a world war, but clearly it was preferable — at least when it comes to relationships.
Advanced technology, while created by well-meaning people to help us, has only hindered my generation. It has so altered the landscape of relationships that it is now almost unrecognisable from what it was a decade ago, and all the worse for it.
Tangled in technology
Are dating websites a good way to meet new people, or just a giant online meat market? Are mobile phones a great way to inform a date that you are going to be late, or just an excuse to be flaky and cancel on them?
Is texting a useful way for the shy to ask people out, or rather an effective way for the foolish to send 18 missives in an hour to a paramour, thus making complete idiots of themselves?
Old-fashioned courtship has been replaced by some speeded-up version of romance, where relationships are as changeable as Facebook status updates or Twitter tweets, so transient that you can barely call them relationships in the first place.
“I think that there are benefits to it,” says Paula Hall, a relationship psychotherapist. “It expands the market for you and you can find out pretty quickly whether or not they are serial killers.
“But things can unravel very fast. You can discover that you get through your quota of text bundles in a week talking to a person, and that the only way to gain any mystery is by running out of phone credit.
"There is less space for personal reflection, and there is a danger that you make judgments based on what you see of them on the internet, rather than face to face.”
Technology has also more or less killed the language of love stone dead. A recent survey by the National Trust found that 62 per cent of us had never written a love letter, though the majority of us would like to receive one.
So what will remind us of relationships gone by 50 years in the future? A text that reads “I think U R Gr8”? An email from some Hotmail account we haven’t forgotten the password to? And could it be that the generation you’d expect to be having the most romantic fun might actually be the most miserable of all?
