Recently I was watching the movie Sixteen Candles, one of my all-time favorites. Back in the time of passing notes in study hall, pre-texting. Sam drops a note to her friend behind her and Jake Ryan uses his foot to grab it. Classic. I actually used to dream that when I turned 16 someone like Jake Ryan would have a birthday cake waiting for me and we would kiss over the candles while hoping our clothes didn’t catch fire. It didn’t happen in case you were wondering. Those were the days I would talk on the phone for hours, stretching the cord of the kitchen wall phone until it reached the bathroom to get away from the ears of my parents. The days when if we wanted to gossip in class we had to write it on a note and do a strategic stretch along with hand signals to ensure the note made it across the room to the proper person. We didn’t want just anyone reading our thoughts “Becky, look at her butt, it’s so big”. I’m not really sure why the 15 kids that passed the note for you never took it and read it. I guess it must have been an unspoken rule, instant death would become of anyone that dared to open that white triangular piece of paper.

I suppose teens these days don’t need to pass notes anymore right? They just text anything they are thinking about. We were a tougher breed, it took work to get messages across. We had to write down which boy we liked, go out of our way in school to find our BFF to give them the note, then that BFF had to write another note, go out of their way to find said boy and pass him the new note asking if he liked you, find the boy again to get a response, write out a new note, go find you, etc. By the time you found out if a boy liked you, you were over them and writing a new boy’s name down on another piece of paper. Then the BFF had to go find the boy to let him know you changed your mind. It wasn’t easy.

I had a boyfriend freshman year of high school that I never had any communication with during our entire three days of dating. A friend asked me if I wanted to go out with a boy, I said yes. Then she told him I said yes, then she told me we were dating. During our entire relationship, we never saw each other and/or spoke once. On that third day the same friend told me he wanted to break up. He probably wanted to break up the next day but it took an extra two days just to get the message passed along. It was heartbreaking, I’m pretty sure he was the love of my life. But like I said, we were a tough breed. I was handing off a new note to my BFF the very next day.

I’m not really sure which generation I think is better off, there are definitely pros and cons to each.  We didn’t have to worry about our notes being forwarded to the wrong person, we could have literally eaten or burned the evidence if you had to. However, it took forever to find out if someone liked you. We didn’t have to worry about sending a text to the wrong person. We never said, “Ooops I didn’t mean to hand you that note”. Unless we had just sprayed Aqua Net in our eyes by accident and were having trouble seeing. There was basically no chance of inappropriate photos being sent around unless we found someone to take a picture of us, brought the film to be developed, were actually brave enough to pick up the photos knowing the person who developed them just looked at them, then had multiple copies made and handed them out in school. However, we actually had to talk to people on the phone to make plans. Which is most likely the reason everyone my age hates the phone.