Dating in the age of Facebook

MANILA, Philippines – Whatever happened to telebabad? Doesn’t anyone burn the lines anymore these days? Apparently not. The last time my PLDT landline played any important role in my love life was back in 2003. Two- or three- hour nightly conversations that dragged on until 2 a.m. Conversations that made you feel 16 again because, that is exactly what every girl — in my time, anyway — did when she was 16, only under the covers and with her giggles less censored.

I can’t remember the last time I spoke at length to a guy I was just getting to know over the landline. And I also can’t remember the last time I got jumpy and excited each time the non-mobile phone would ring. The only people who call me on my landline these days are my mother and those home shopping channel telemarketers. Hardly worth jumping the ottoman over (no offense Mom).

So now, I rely on my PLDT DSL to make some kind of social connection. As does everyone else. People now chat on YM, flirt on Facebook, videoconference on Skype and send out animated emoticons to elicit giddy reactions. The Internet and all these social networking sites and software applications have changed the way relationships progress. If elders lamented how traditional Filipino courtship rituals were slowly being effaced when I was a teen all those years ago, what would they say now? Because it seems you don’t need these old school rituals — afternoon visits, nightly calls, hand-written letters sent through her younger kid brother — anymore. Getting to know someone can be achieved through a 13-inch screen and with a single click of the mouse.

An old friend of mine, a photographer I’ve been working with since my Preview days, was telling me about how his son was invited to a prom via YouTube. Huh? The girl, apparently, collected pictures of his son into some montage, added some pop music, ended the whole thing with a cheeky “would you” question and posted it on YouTube. The boy said “yes.” Easy as a trip to the ladies’ room.

I was awed. When I had to do the asking for my prom 15 years ago I had to walk up to the guy in a party and squeak out some inane, hackneyed spiel that had both his and my own friends smirking somewhere in the hazy background. I think he agreed just to save both of us some form of embarrassment. Fact is, I did it face-to-face, eye-to-ear (staring intently into his eyes would have made me look too desperate). And that was not easy. At all. What I, and probably thousands of other girls in 1994, would have given to have the luxury of uploaded video invites.

Granted that the girl must have been no less nervous uploading that video on YouTube than I was in that dim-lit garage years ago. It’s just the medium that has changed. The anxieties, paranoia and expectancies are all still there.

The New Booty Call

I only saw the trailer for the movie but this line stuck out and made such an impression. And I don’t even have a MySpace account. It’s from the movie He’s Just Not That Into You, where the character played by Drew Barrymore, your average, cute, late-20s, relationship-seeking city girl, excitedly tells a gaggle of gay officemates that some guy has MySpaced her. One of them, the bitchiest-looking one, effectively douses her cyber glow by saying, “MySpace is the new booty call.” Which, translated into 21st century-single-woman terms means, “He will only call you when he’s drunk and needy and desperate at three in the morning.”

Because of the proliferation of social networking sites, it’s so easy for the single 20- and 30-somethings set to now hook up with each other. All of these — MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, Skype — are expressways to relationships and connections that, 10 years ago would have taken more weeks and text message money to forge. But then all the fast-track exchanges afforded by email and instant messaging has also blurred the borders a bit and muddled up a few real intentions. The fact that he messaged you on MySpace rather than called should mean that he’s not that into you; any guy who’s really interested would rather punch in numbers than type on a keyboard. Right? Maybe not in all cases.

A friend of mine, Rina, met this German guy in Hong Kong last year and they had one of those great one-day moments you only see in movies like Before Sunrise. When they each went back to their own countries, they reconnected through Facebook and Skype’s video chat service and even relied on these portals to foster something close to a romantic relationship. Not once did they talk on the phone the entire time. A month later, he flew to Manila just to see her. A couple of months later, she went to Singapore to meet up with him on one of his business trips. They’re probably planning names for their blue-eyed, black-haired babies by now in between shuttling back and forth to each other’s countries. Or not. Thing is, something as supposedly superficial as Facebook helped further a real relationship.

So yeah, MySpace may or may not be the new booty call. As for Facebook? It’s the new form of foreplay.

Facebook And The Single Girl

Just admit that you cyber-stalk. It’s everybody’s secret cheap thrill. Met a really great guy at some club? What’s the first thing you do, apart from securing his digits? You look him up on Facebook. See if you have any mutual friends. Soon as he accepts your friend request (he probably requested you first, which begs the question: does that mean he’s really into you if he searched you out?), you check out his photos, where he works, the cities he’s visited and his favorite quote. Really, what does a Facebook profile reveal about a person anyway? That he likes hip-hop, has probably traveled to Prague once in his life, can pull off skinny jeans and has a really skanky-looking ex-girlfriend (we automatically assume it’s an ex, of course).

But sometimes, we just don’t stop there. Interest urges us to glean out a whole personality from collected albums and randomly-taken images. So, let’s say, he has tons of photos with people bearing the same last name and the same crooked nose, we tend to think, “Oh, he’s family-oriented.” Photos in an art exhibit: he’s cultured. Rock-climbing: he’s adventurous. With lots of girls: that one’s easy. He’s a player. Duh! More so if a lot of girls have posted on his wall. He has a funny comment in one photo: Oh, he’s a Monty Python fan.

All these photo-posting sites can be so revealing as to mislead. Which has spurred quicker minds to be extremely careful. My friend Andrea met a guy half a minute after breaking up with her last flame. Right before she accepted the friend request from this new prospect, she messaged all her girl friends to erase all photos she might have of her with her ex. Andrea didn’t want any unwelcome questions about her past from her Future. It was that simple. After all, when Facebook does mislead, it can do so in the worst way possible.

 “He was online the whole night and he never chatted me up,” my friend Jenny wailed one night over dinner. Facebook has struck again. Not chatting up a girl when she’s online is pretty much tantamount to not calling. That’s how we girls think, anyway; hence, a guy has lost interest. Jenny had recently met a guy, a nice one — you know, likes jazz and Pacino movies and has actually cooked dinner for her — and they spent three consecutive nights together. On the fourth day, he slowly disappeared. No text messages, no call and his Facebook status sounded suspiciously like he was moving on from their new-found relationship, uh, friendship. Whatever. Plus, there was that re-edited photo album of himself and his ex that popped up on his profile page soon as Jenny logged on to it. Jenny was all set to relegate Mr. No Chat into her list of could-have-beens. By the way, did I mention that he actually untagged himself from one of their photos together? (He left four others tagged, though.)

By this time, Jenny, already tipsy from two glasses of Merlot, was all set to drown her sorrows in a viewing of the last three episodes of Grey’s Anatomy season 5 on YouTube. She was delayed by a very obvious, if not exaggerated, eye roll from our guy friend Rey. “Guys don’t think like that,” he scoffed. “We don’t update an album or our status just to make a girl think we don’t like her anymore. We just say it straight.” To her face? “Yes…or maybe through SMS. Or an e-mail. Whatever’s convenient.” Evidently, even breaking up on cyberspace is now no biggie.

Maybe girls over-analyze things. Which is not exactly the point of this Jenny story. Facebook is. And how it, and all these other personal page sites, has changed the landscape of modern human relations.

Skype’s The Limit

I’ve now stopped feeling insulted when a friend disappears in the middle of chat conversation on Skype. “I have to go invisible for a while. Someone, I’m trying to avoid just got online,” is the usual explanation.

Does this mean: if you’re interested, you go online? Otherwise, you remain invisible. “That’s why I don’t accept gigs on Skype,” a guy friend of mine said. By “gigs,” he meant girls he would take home — but not necessarily to mother. The video and voice chat features provided by Skype (and certain versions of Yahoo Messenger) affords a bit more intimacy. Not to mention accessibility. It is harder to ignore an Internet call more than the beginnings of a social network chat.

Which probably explains why I only have 16 contacts on Skype as opposed to half a thousand friends on FB. (Ideally, I would really only prefer to chat and keep in touch with 20 of these Facebook friends on a regular basis.) At this point, though, my accepting — or inviting — a guy as a contact on Skype shouldn’t really mean anything, considering the fuzzy rules and standards of cyber networking. Maybe I’ll know if a guy really is the One if he asks for my landline and will actually call me on it. Just like they did it in the olden days.

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E-mail comments, but not propositions, to ana_kalaw@pldtdsl.net.