Is my boyfriend cheating on me?

I really enjoyed this reading making the Connection: Single Women's Use of the Telephone in Dating Relationships With Men. I guess becuase I'm a single woman, the article title drew my attention right away.

It was really fun to read about how technology changed our way of datings as well.

As I kept reading, I realized even people in a different culture a decade ago shows the similarity on how they use when they date with someon--waiting him to call me and getting angry if he doesn’t. I used to hear often my friends sighing because of that too.

There are cultural differences between Korea and the U.S. on regarding to phone use. It’s like a rule among us, girls. I don’t remember them all, but I can give a couple of them.

Here is a females' rule:

1. Do not answer the phone at least twice so that you can pretend you were not waiting for his call. Men never give food to HIS fish. What it means is that when men think his girlfriend loves him more, they don't try hard to develop their relationship better. (Not everyman in Korea is like that though.) So, it is one way to control him at the beginning of their relationship. However, if he doen't call at the third time, women get angry and regret.

2. Do not answer the phone on the night when you go to a nightclub with your female friends. Sometiomes you have a girls’ night with only your female friends. You have to hang out with your friends also and you go to a club and meet new faces. But as you get to the club, the phone rings in your bag. He keeps calling you. Noisy music around, people shouting. If you answer the phone, he will definately know where you are. So, do not answer the phone! Just tell him that you went to bed early the next day.

It’s not something about the phone, but I quite often hear from friends that she always logs in his social networking sites with his password and checks her boyfriends’ emails. Sometimes they use GPA system on cellphone, so that they can track down where he is and make sure if he is not cheating on me.

I think distrust is one thing that comes to the surface in the interpersonal relationship thanks to technologies. I don't know if there were more distrust between lovers in the period without technologies or not. But I think we can notice if he or she cheats on the other in the relationship easily.

As technology evolves, social interactions change

Recognizing and analyzing people's agency in the usage and effects of technology is an important step in understanding our social world. (Humphreys: Cellphones in public, p. 829)

At first, the text "Making Connections: Single Women's Use of the Telephone in Dating Relationships With Men" seemed irrelevant to me. I often asked myself while reading it: "Really? You wrote an entire research article to tell me things that I already know about?" But after thinking about it for a moment, and especially after I read "Cellphones in public: social interactions in a wireless era," I figured how technology, no matter what it is (i.e. cell phone, computer), affects people's interactions and, as a consequence, our social world.

Back in 1993, when Amy Sarch's article "Making Connections" was published, telephone use showed an interesting pattern in women's dating relationships -- that only men were expected to pursue them. The social norm ruled that women could or should not show their interest. That obviously affected how they communicated via phone. Women weren't supposed to call. Women were expected to anxiously and passively sit and wait for the men's attitude. WHat a horrible feeling!

I experienced that during my teenage years, although I must confess that I didn't always sit and wait. :) Perhaps I belong to a generation that started to see things differently, to not accept the norms, and to act more proactively. There's a good chance that the advances in technology contributed to that.

Nowadays, with the newer generations of cell phone and social networking sites, men and women in dating relationships don't need to rely on telephone only to communicate. In fact, most people don't. I have noticed that people who are still seeing each other and/or have just started to go out together will most frequently text message or facebook each other instead of calling. Does it matter who sends the message first? I'm not really sure. Perhaps men are still expected to be more active than women, but that's no longer that big of a problem as far as I can see it. Of course I am speaking from the Western culture perspective and this may not be true in other cultures.

Sarch discusses the social meaning of answering machines on p. 140 -- she says that women would not leave a message when they first reached the answering machine of their dates. After carefully thinking about what their message would be, they would call again and only then leave the "right" message. Nowadays, in an era when couples can can text message and facebook each other, leaving the wrong message is no longer a problem. People can think about what they are going to say and leave the message right away.

So it's interesting to see how technology can bring different types of interactions to our society. And, to me, this is the most important aspect of both readings.

Below is a funny video I found on Vimeo, which shows how people are now often choosing texting over talking... a consequence of technology?