When I was a teenager ,18, 19 maybe ,love was slow. It was SMS with 160 characters, expensive enough that every word mattered. It was MSN Messenger, where the rush wasn’t a notification ping but seeing your crush’s name suddenly light up online. That tiny green dot was adrenaline, etiquette, restraint, and longing all rolled into one. How long do you wait before saying hi? How do you not look desperate? The silence, the waiting ,that was the romance.
And even before that, there was anticipation in its purest form: the art of running into someone by accident. Or not-so-accidentally planning your steps, your timing, your route, just to secure five minutes of conversation in a hallway, outside a classroom, in a café you knew they liked. Five minutes that meant the world. Five minutes that lived inside you for days afterward.
Then came WhatsApp and BBM. At first, I didn’t care. My phone didn’t even support those apps. I wasn’t bothered. Life still functioned without them. But I still remember why I finally caved. I was seeing someone then, and she told me about a workaround, a way to log in through a clunky website that bundled WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, all in one. It wasn’t even the real app. Every time I wanted to check in, I had to go through that extra effort of logging into the site. And I did it, not because I needed WhatsApp, but because I wanted to stay connected to her. That was the first time I gave in. And honestly, that was the start of the downhill.
“Instant.” Such a harmless word, but such a dangerous shift. Instant meant urgency. Urgency meant no space, no waiting, no breathing. Suddenly, if you didn’t reply in five minutes, it was a crisis. Most of the time, nothing was urgent, yet everything felt urgent. That’s how freedom got stolen, quietly, message by message.
We lost more than privacy, we lost romance. Long dinners where you saved stories to tell. Long walks where silence had weight because you hadn’t already texted every thought during the day. Now nothing waits. Everything is dumped, instantly. The art of holding back, of anticipation, of savoring… gone.
And with it came codependency. People tying their self-worth to a “seen” tick, to how fast someone types back. Relationships collapsing into constant chatter until two people merge into one shapeless blob, hobbies and identities absorbed. What started as urgency turns into erasure.
Sometimes I think my mother was right when she said all of my problems come from my phone. Maybe she had a vision. I regret not taking it seriously sooner. I miss not being available. I miss mystery. I miss freedom.
And more than anything, I miss letters. I miss writing something you knew might not be answered for weeks. The waiting, the delicious tension of it. And when the reply finally came, you read it a million times, dissected every word, memorized every sentence by heart. Because it had weight. It had magnitude. Words were all we had and they were so important.
I am lucky though, The only place I still find it is thirty meters underwater, diving, where no signal can reach me. Down there, silence still belongs to me.
FrequencyForty 