Demise of the long phone conversation

It's strange. When I was much younger, I used to spend hours on the phone after school talking to friends. While it was not exactly a daily affair, it occurred regularly enough - two- or three-hour conversations were the norm, especially when it was someone special. In fact, there were times when I talked on the phone through the night.

Yet the irony is that I hardly chat with any of my friends over the phone anymore, even though technological advances have made the mobile phone an almost indispensable part of most people's lives.

I often tell myself it's because I prefer to talk to them face to face. That's true to a certain extent. There's something about talking to someone who is physically with you that makes it more intimate, something that goes beyond the ability to see how a person reacts to you and the things you say.

But more than that, it seems that no time is a good time to call my friends up. There's always something else I have to do or want to do. And this of course brings with it the concomitant fear of catching people at the wrong time, that they may be busy or preoccupied with more pressing matters.

My argument is that as one grows older, there seems to be a corresponding increase in the demands on one's time. There was a time when life for me was just about school and friends. But then it got more complicated, when the demands of love and work set in and brought with them more worries and responsibilities, until there came a time when chatting with or calling my friends always seemed like a bad idea or the last thing on my mind.

All this is not to say I don't enjoy talking to my friends. I do. A lot. But people and circumstances do change. What may be more important then, I feel, is the effort put in to keep the friendship going rather than the means utilised. So my dear friends, please don't be too harsh on me.