I have mixed emotions about technology. I tend to glorify the era I spend the majority of my university tuition on: the Romantic era. Austen's books would whisk me away to a time before cell phones (before phones!), before computers, before electricity, before automobiles. Where heroines would read letters from their beaus by candlelight, once, twice, thrice times over and keep them, folded, with their handkerchiefs in a purse. Next to their dance cards, etc.I signed up for my first cell phone contract at the ripe age of 26. I even survived a year in Korea without one. I figured, if people wanted to get me on the phone, they'd have to call during the hours that I was in my apartment. Or else it couldn't have been that important. And, in the case of an emergency, call the cops! or an ambulance! what am I going to do about it?
Once I found myself in a stable, long-term relationship, and with the idea of not being able to get in touch with me beginning to drive Andrew to acts of quiet desperation, I signed a three year contract with Rogers. If Andrew hadn't been with me at the time, I don't think I could have gone through with it. BUT WHAT OF READING LETTERS BY CANDLELIGHT?
Nearly four years and an iPhone upgrade later, I hardly think of my cell phone except to answer it, text on it, check my email by it, browse the weather on it, call from it, and amuse myself with games I have programmed into it. Recently, I completed Splume's level 20 in 54.8 seconds. EAT IT.
However, I still can't help but wonder if technology has taken its toll on romance. Anyone in a relationship can tell you that most of the Most Important Conversations you have with a partner grow out of times that there is silence and general inactivity: a car ride, a lazy afternoon, or right before bed. Don't you find these moment less frequent since technology has been squeezing its way into them? How many heartfelt conversations have never bloomed, or have been interrupted, due to a call-, text-, Ping-, Google-, or Wiki-related emergency?
And yet, without technology, Andrew and I wouldn't have flirted shamelessly by posting multiple comments on each other's blogs before we dated. I wouldn't have received the adorable emails in the beginning of our relationship, like this:
We wouldn't have the cell phone pictures of us eating take-out Chinese after moving me into my apartment:
We wouldn't have stories about our notorious beepy phones in the early days, we wouldn't have the DVD of our wedding, we wouldn't have the text-banter we now share as a married couple, we wouldn't know how many Rotten Tomatoes a movie had before seeing it for date night, and we'd never know who was right in a grammatical argument without the online OED at our fingertips.I'd love to know people's thoughts on the subject. How has technology helped or hampered your romantic relationships?
