The Outset of A Relationship between “in” and “on”
Approximately ten years ago, we have not had robust entanglement on social media because at that time no many people had had smartphones. I still remember if wanting to download several new songs, I had to download them by going to internet café even though I had had a handphone which was able to function to access internet. Commonly, I used my handphone to only access several social medias, namely twitter and in particular facebook. At that time, there have not been a large number of social medias like nowadays.
Yesterday, I asked one of my friends who had met his new date whom he got from an app. I satirised him by questioning “If your new date becomes your upcoming wife, what do you answer when asked where did you meet your wife before?” It is ridiculous and ludicrous to answer that you met her not “in” but “on”. It really means that your scope of your date is commenced “on screen”. As millennials like my generation, I think that meeting a special person “on” is not so prestigious and humanlike as meeting a special person “in” is.
Indeed, millennials experience two shifting periods, because we are a generation in-between. I still remember giving my special woman a letter in my elementary school, which it would never happen if I were Gen Z. In giving a letter to whom we adore, we are required to directly meet the receiver of the letter, our beloved, whereas in social media era we do not need to have met face-to-face at first hand without intermediary. We only need to type “on” direct message with possibly our fake account.
In my friend’s case above, he, as millennial as well, would feel not nice to say that at the first time he met his wife “on” not “in” a special place, because, usually, as millennials, we identify real places as “our embodiment relations” to what the world actually is. But, unluckily, on social media, we, as millennials, can scarcely regard “Tinder”, for instance, as “a special place” to find and meet our special person at the first time.
It is different enough to answer “I met her ‘in’ a great park, for example, when both of us suddenly bumped into” with “I met her ‘on’ Tinder because of match by algorithm or met him on Instagram by scrolling his photos”. As millennials, I consider such a superficial and artificial meeting not the same as we physically meet the special person, because of only by outright confronting my physical presence with her physical presence can I reconcile my chemistry and my psychical field with hers. It will not occur when we initiate our amour by merely scrolling and then staring at her photos on a screen of our smartphone, and subsequently surprisingly declare, “O, she is truly whom I am hooked on.”
The technology, that is smartphone, in this point, has in fact shaped not only our worldview of the world, but also our mentality in dealing with the reality itself. I am sure that it has been rare that a couple find each other “in” a special place, because they mostly and commonly start a relationship “on”. As millennials, we feel it weird, and we taste that our relationship is not firmly based upon the wet reality in which we dwell and outpour our concrete and wet love.
So far, and as far as I remember, I have not started a relationship by scrolling “on” yet. I am a factual human being who is residing in the actual reality. I emphasise my physical and psychical realm to have “embodiment relations” outright to the real world. Irrespective of my personal experience, my friend whom I asked yesterday felt stuttered and stammered to expound to whoever asks him like my question, especially if his or her parents ask, “Where did you meet your sweetheart at the first time?” Absolutely, (s)he feels silly, as human being who lives “in the real world”, to answer such an upsetting question straightforwardly and naively, “I met her or him ‘on’ the other world, Mum. I’m solemnly sorry.”[]