Wednesday, March 11, 2009

How YOU Doin'?




Imagine yourself in the following situation: You’re at a bar, dancing with a really good looking person and you want to somehow contact them at a later date.

Do you: a) Ask for their number
b) Get their email address
c) Find out their name so you can find (or creep) them on Facebook later

Oh how simple dating used to be. Way back when the way to contact a person would be through a phone call. Nowadays hardly anyone will give out their home phone number, if they even have a home phone. Technology has had an increasing role in the way that people date and maintain romantic relationships.
I got the idea for this post the other day when I was watching Gilmore Girls on CosmoTV. The station will show trivia at each commercial break and on this particular day it had something to do with using technology for dating. Whatever the fact was (because for the life of me I cannot remember) it made me think about how many people use different forms of technology to pick up.
I mentioned in a post a few weeks back about He’s Just Not That Into You and how Drew Barrymore’s character needed to check all sorts of technology just to try and get in touch with a guy she was interested in. It used to be that you would just check your answering machine and that would be that, but in today’s world, you have to make sure you’re always on the ball and checking any sort of communication device that you’ve got.
So back to my hypothetical situation: once you’ve finally gotten a hold of the hottie from the bar, what is the relationship like? I think that if you had gotten their phone number it would quickly become a lot more personal and you would better be able to see if there was a connection (one which is not influenced by alcohol). While emailing back and forth is more convenient, you could fire off a quick email asking for a supper date while at work; there is a certain something that is lost by not talking over the phone, and especially face to face. You lose the personal tone that comes along with each individual. This new person may be incredibly sarcastic but in an email he or she could come across as kind of mean. Now what about the Facebook option? By becoming friends on Facebook, that special someone can find out more about your hobbies, likes, dislikes, and what kinds of things you and your friends talk about. This could be a good thing because it’ll give you a starting point when you eventually get out on that first date, however, it could also prove to be detrimental because you realize that person from the bar loves their poodle a little too much.
A lot of people will use Facebook to keep updated on all their friends’ relationship statuses. Come on, admit it – you have been immediately curious when you see a change in one of your friend’s relationship status. Just recently I have been curious about why a friend from elementary school and his girlfriend broke up. There was another instance where another friend got rid of the part on the profile where it says single. He is still single but Facebook announces this on the home page that “so and so is no longer single.” Immediately people were asking him who the girl was. Similar occurrences last year led my boyfriend and I to screw with our friends’ heads. We decided to put both our relationship statuses as single and see what people had to say. It turns out that 1. we have a lot of great friends who were concerned about us and 2. way too many people believe what they see on Facebook. Even my roommates were wondering what was up, and I had seen them all just after I changed my status and was clearly fine.
So here you are at last call and are confronted with the possibility of never being able to see the dancing machine from the bar ever again. What are you going to do? You have so many options available to you thanks to technology’s advancements. But worry not, you have been spared this decision tonight – hottie from the bar turns out to have a significant other and they seem none to pleased with you being near their honeymuffin. This would be the time to bolt…and be glad that you never gave away your name, because you can be sure that you’d be the victim of some Facebook stalking. Joey seemed to have it so easy…

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