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I’ve decided to revisit a topic I touched upon just a few weeks ago: the pathetic deterioration of communication between love interests.

Just imagine this for a moment: it’s the 1940’s in New York, you meet a striking young man and he asks for your telephone number. A few days later, a kid hanging out at the local candy store knocks on your door and tells you to come down to the pay phone because there’s someone calling for you. You run out the door and down the block, pick up the receiver and…it’s him, asking if he could take you out.

This isn’t some hypothetical scenario that I jacked from Pearl Harbor, but rather how my grandmother began her relationship with my grandfather. I have trouble truly picturing myself in this situation because my current idea of romance is a properly timed text message. Now I’m aware that there are some guys out there who do go beyond today’s impossibly low standards, but I don’t recall ever hearing a story in my lifetime about a potential suitor throwing pebbles at a friend’s bedroom window.

We are well beyond the age of town criers or singing telegrams, and have instead opted for more discreet forms of communication. If an is IM sent in the middle of the night and no one is there to see it, does it make a sound? I’ve completely botched an age-old philosophical question right there, but my point is that the discreetness of current technology, and the decline in public grand gestures, has made it much easier for people to fudge the confines of reality.

If someone “wrote you a letter” there is cold hard proof of this letter. There is a piece of paper, and an envelope with a stamp and a postmark. You can’t scan into your computer to edit the bits you’re not so crazy about. But if a guy shoots you a text at 1 am asking you to come over, the revised version of the story could easily be, “he texted me last night because he wanted to see me.” You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it!

So folks, how about going forward we just be a little more honest with each other in addition to being more honest with ourselves. A late night message does not a happy relationship make. Shoot for a letter, and at the very least you’ll end up with an e-mail.

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