Hanging on your every text

or “How technology makes dating f%*^&$@ crazy”

My God. What are we doing?

Is this dating?

What does that even mean, anymore.

The rules went and changed a while ago. It’s been a while since I did this. Years, in fact. I feel like Tom Hank’s character in Sleepless in Seattle. I don’t have a kid to call into a radio show, though.

It’s hard enough jumping back in but this thing now happens via text, email and facebook messages. It’s grueling. And exhilarating, in equal amounts. There were once days and weeks between communication to consider and re-consider what was said, done and…unsaid. Now, mere seconds.

I try to remember what we did before all this technology and the way it has changed how people interact and communicate to and with each other. I try to remember less busy schedules and phone calls and a thing called patience. I try to remember what it was like to not obsess over the read receipt that says you read my text five minutes ago.

You’re not responding.

I know you saw it.

Did I say too much?

The wrong thing?

Crap. I did.

[seconds creep by]

OH. You were driving so you couldn’t reply. GOT IT.

You reply more quickly than you did before. I’ll try not to read in that.

We are bantering more. Being vulnerable. Expressing surprising wit, humility and candor via virtual means. Everything is happening with these phones — they are the tin cans and string that connect me to your guarded heart; you to mine as it mends.

Times have changed, but dating hasn’t. It is tenuous, terrifying, titillating.

Are we even dating? Is that what we are doing?

[Read Yesterday]