Love is out of ink: Valentines in the age of the 'emoticon'

Social networking and digital gifts have reinvented Valentine's Day.

from the February 14, 2007 edition

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Joan Grundtvig, a retired school teacher sipping a chai tea latte at the next table, says investing that much time in "other watching" is outrageous.

"Kids today are so busy text messaging and writing e-mails, they think it's too much trouble to pick up the phone and call, let alone actually write a Valentine," she says.

Alex Huf, a Santa Monica College student, says the Internet has expanded the notion of Valentine's Day beyond the motive of public (or private) declarations of romantic love.

"Social-networking sites have reinvented the holiday because they've allowed it to become less emotionally charged than it was," says Mr. Huf.

Many singles who once felt left out for not being in a relationship no longer have to run for cover on Valentine's Day, he adds.

"Now with just a couple of clicks of the mouse you can send a little gesture that doesn't have to have as much gravity as roses, or chocolate, or a card from a store," Huf says. "You can tell more people, 'Hey, I care for you, I'm thinking of you, you are important to me'."

As singles find ways to celebrate Valentine's Day by hanging out online, couples are also making use of technology to stay connected, says Michelle R. Callahan, a relationship expert and development psychologist for Skype, an Internet phone service.

"Technology has completely changed the way that couples are in touch with each other," says Dr. Callahan.

A recent Skype poll found about three in four US adults have a significant other, and among those who do, 94 percent say technology is at least somewhat important to being able to communicate with their partner when they're apart. Three in four say technology is important or very important, and about half say technology is very important.

There are pros and cons to affection going digital and public, say social anthropologists. Some worry about sexual predation and identity fraud. Are the correspondents who they say they are, and how much personal information is getting into the wrong hands?

Others suggest that the proliferation of love pronouncements via the Internet is recasting social norms of what constitutes public and private information.

"The Internet is opening up a vast web of potential connections to others so that the possibility of a love connection is far larger," says Robert Rosenwein, a sociologist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. "Paradoxically, there is also a new boldness to make proclamations that essentially become public that might be regretted later. Online, people get to a level of personal disclosure about their feelings much more quickly than they do face to face ... and they fall in love more quietly without the additional visual cues of being together."

Whatever form pronouncements of love take, experts and lovers alike agree on two principles. One is that the more effort someone puts into sending a message, the more weighty its effect.

"Yeah, taking the time to send a card is definitely more time-intensive than an e-mail," says Huf. "And hand writing a letter is way at the top of the list. You don't even have a spell-check function for that."

The other principle is that the needs of the human heart seem unchanged through the ages.

"You can look at all these technological changes and think things are so different from earlier centuries," says Libby O'Connell, chief historian at History.com, the website of the History Channel. "But there has always been a certain impulse in human existence to proclaim your love."

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