Archaic Ways We Used to Have to Flirt
Article written by Kendra Beltran
When you’re young you think that your generation has obviously reached the tip-top of society and nothing will ever improve from that point on. Of course, every generation has been dead wrong about that seeing as our grandparents dated whoever was closest to their farmland, and today we can go on a date with someone in an entirely different time zone thanks to shit like Zoom. Which, we wouldn’t even get to the date if it wasn’t for the initial flirting, right? Well, in the past two decades flirting has gotten a major makeover as well because even in my 30’s - looking back at how we used to flirt seems archaic compared to today. But since I love to feel my age, let’s take a look back at the old-timey way elder millennials flirted in their youth.
Sending Handwritten Notes
Long before you could spend your entire history class texting underneath your desk, there were these wondrous things called a pen and a paper. What did we do with these objects? Well, we wrote notes. Yes, many of them were for our best friends but every once in a while we’d get the courage to scribble down some adolescent nonsense to our crush and hope they not only read it, but also didn’t laugh at it, rip it up in our face, and let us die of embarrassment. People wonder why millennials are so freaked out all the time. Hell, we anchored the era of note-passing! Again, today, you can easily send someone you like a quick text and if they leave you on read, at least there’s no legit physical evidence written in gel pen. Gel pens? Oh, that’s another story for another day.
Actually Calling Them
Those little machines we’re obsessed with today that do everything from allowing us to Google restaurants beforehand to filming endless TikTok videos - they are also phones. I know, wild - and before they were sadly our lifelines, they were just basic ass phones in our homes. Sometimes attached to a cord. I know, wild - but if you liked someone back in the day and wanted to flirt with them in a big way, you mustered up the courage and actually dialed their number, waited for them to answer, and then likely hung up. No, just kidding. You stayed on the phone and talked until your parents kicked you off to go to bed, or your older sibling needed to use the internet. Use the internet? Like gel pens, another story for another day.
Putting Crush in Top 8
As the years went by and cellphones started to make notes and actually talking obsolete, we moved our flirting online and to the wonderful world of MySpace. The grandzaddy of social media giants like Facebook and Instagram, MySpace was a glorious place where you had your own little page, made it shine and shimmer with HTML, and picked your top friends to display on said page. Usually, this consisted of eight friends, and if you wanted to send the person you liked a clear message that you were into them - you put their ass in that top eight and waited for them to do the same or ignore your grand gesture. Today, it’s more than likely you’d just slide into their DM’s and be done with it.
Make a MySpace Bulletin
Another aspect of MySpace were bulletins and the most popular kind were these drawn-out surveys that were basically just time-wasters BUT if there happened to be a question about who you were into or anything along those lines, you could very well get your flirt on with those answers because you just never knew who would read those.
Poking on Facebook
Last, but certainly, not least is poking the person you liked on Facebook. There is a lot of insanity that goes down on the book of face, but poking has got to be one of the stupidest. You’d basically hit a button and it’d alert the person that you poked them. It was sort of like a little, “thinking of you” gesture. As you can see, over the years flirting has gotten a hell of a lot less intimate as we started with notes and ended with a digital poke. Lawd, help us.
