I just imagined what my parents had to go through to reach each other because I am very sure that in their days, there was no mobile phone and so was there no social media.
They were patient to believe that a letter they took time to write will reach the other person in weeks and should he or she be outside the country, they would still be cool with the number of months it would take before their loved ones read the messages.
That was the teens of those days. They were smart and intelligent; rough and arrogant; clueless and carefree just like everything we see today. Everything was just the same but their patience. They believed in friendship and loved; they worked to keep their friends and these are virtues that have been long lost since the teens of today took over the terrain.
Mine was the ushering of the social media age and it was mixed with lots of excitement. We only needed just one best friend and the rest are people we might never meet till we depart from earth and I have come to understand that we often change these friends so often that our toothbrushes often outlive them.
Teenagers are usually impatient and I wonder why. Maybe because they somehow realize that they won’t be in that age bracket forever or because the developments in them make them feel that everything should be speedy.
They send a message to you via social media and expect you to reply instantly even if the other person is in the church. They live their lives on tips the read online and get frustrated when they fail to get the result forecasted on the tips at the ideal time. They don’t care about the natural laws of life and are ready to trust a relationship blog more than their parents.
Social media was one place we learnt so much; the good, the bad and the ugly. There was no restriction because there, you are friend to entirely everything.
People who are afraid of falling in love with the guy next door, did that comfortably with the guy in the next state. How could that be when there is no intention of physical contact, why would someone just trust someone he or she knows nothing about and then throw away the person next to him because he or she believe in such things as the other person is nasty. And most times, these are assumptions built by jealousy and pride.
Teens today always want to be tagged the ‘mystery guy’ or ‘mystery babe’. They don’t want anyone to know so much about them and so they mostly prefer relationships with people far from them and for people like this, there is usually someone around who is more of an accompanist than a best friend.
Our parents still talk about with their primary school friends and they can remember so many things they did together because then, friends were few and that gave it so much meaning.
Most young teenagers today would rather remember their Facebook friends than their primary school friends. In most cases while they exchange less than 500 words on the average some of their secondary school class mates, they exhaust the same number of words with an online friends in a day.
Things are much more easier today because we can just make friends with a click, we can share our secrets with people we do not know a thing about and it is so funny that while a young girl cannot release her phone number and address to the guy beside her as they travelled from Owerri to Enugu, she still has them clearly spelt out on her Facebook profile.
You can now question the sense in what she is doing because she could still pop on the list of people the guy may know on Facebook in a months time.
Today’s teens have lost the taste of friendship, for guys, they have suddenly become the one that accompanies them to see a girl, to drink or someone whom you get the best challenge from in video games. It has become friends with benefits and when the benefits are gone or when priorities change, you people who used to look like best friends walk past each other on the road without muttering hello or hi.
Girls turn out to be the worst in this because once you are off the radar as a girlfriend, you are gone for life. Guys can come together to share drinks and stuffs like that but girls are quick to mark people off their lives and that will be the end of it.
No one seems to be bothered anymore because we all believe everything is going the way they are supposed to. No one wants to show concern because we believe that what friendship used to be is now a myth or some old fashioned story. We go on to forget that people who cannot keep friends find it difficult to trust and if someone cannot trust, love is far from what they will ever feel.
Our parents might be celebrating the teens they used to be and I also know that today’s teens would someday also talk about the teens they used to be, but that would only be if they turn out to be better than what we would be having then.
Maybe then, someone would invent friendship compatibility device that would take over our sense of reasoning making people machines.
