Dating in the 'olden days'

I recently turned 35. That means I've been dating for more than half my life. I was thinking back to what feels like the dark ages and how much things have changed. I suppose the change was inevitable considering the advances mankind has made in terms of technology and the way we live.

Of course it was before cellphones, smartphones, the internet and social networking. The boy who was interested in you or who was dating you used to phone you on the landline. You used to talk for ages until your mother threatened you. I remember lying on my parent's bed, talking crap, sometimes paging through a magazine. Now, if your man does call you, you can be doing any number of things…. driving, training at gym, grocery/clothes shopping, cooking dinner, working on your laptop or shaving your legs.

There was also no texting. If someone was late for a date, they couldn’t tell you. You had to wait or leave, depending on who you were waiting for and what you were doing. You also couldn’t keep track of anyone or see when they were ignoring you according to the "D" or "R" or ticks on a message and you couldn’t see what time they'd been online or what they'd been up through status updates. Although, I do remember the days waiting for the phone to ring because he said he would. It was agonising! And you also couldn’t double check his excuse for not calling. :)

Back then, when you met someone, you actually had to make an effort to get to know them. One of my worst habits these days is Googling people I meet if I'm interested in them. It's just so easy to find out things about people online (unless their Facebook privacy settings are really high) and then pre-judge them or come up with things to talk about that are of interest to them (within reason, I just can't bring myself to talk about collecting Japanese comic figurines). Now your entire life (or at least the last 6 years of it) is potentially plastered all over the internet. Where you've been, who you've been with, what you got up to and all with photos to add to the information.

Looking back, it also feels like dating was simpler, at least at a co-ed school. You started talking to someone at school, you exchanged phone numbers, you went out. If all went well, he asked you to be his girlfriend or if you would go out with him. You said yes or no and that was that. If you said yes, you were spoken for. You spoke every day, went out on weekends, referred to each other as your boyfriend/girlfriend and things were great. When you broke up, you broke up and that was it. Ok, sometimes you got back together every few months, but generally outgrew it.

These days, you 'chat', you 'research' each other, you go out and things move quickly from one stage to the next without anyone actually saying much about it. It confuses me. These days, you can't assume anything because there is so much going on and so much to keep track of that the chances of misreading a situation or gesture are bigger than before. Society has created so many different relationship definitions like friends with benefits, fuck buddy's, Mr Right for Now, and if you're lucky, the good old-fashioned boyfriend/girlfriend. To be honest I can't even remember when last I was called a girlfriend!  

Wouldn't it be nice if once in a while we could slow down and go back to the olden days where things were simple and you knew what was what?