Dating in the Pre-Cell Phone Era

Mom, Dad, and her sisters on their engagement day — Mom’s in the blue dress

In a recent post, I talked about how the entire millennial generation has been royally screwed. It left me yearning for a period of time in history I’d never actually experienced. This week, I decided to gift y’all with a vignette of my immediate family’s origin love story that takes place in the 1970s.

Sometime in the late 1970s, Tesfaye, a dashing Ethiopian doctor educated abroad went to a dope-ass house party in Addis Ababa. There, he met Wagaye, a beautiful, shy, and intelligent young woman who’d just graduated from Commercial School, the premier secretarial school in Ethiopia. While I was not there during the making of this love story, I imagine it went a little something like this: Tesfaye arrived at the party with his homeboys. The host greeted them, made small talk, and walked away to go greet other guests. One of Tesfaye’s homeboys went to the restroom and another went to greet someone he knew. As Tesfaye looked around, he didn’t see anyone he knew, so he found himself a corner, whipped out his iPhone, and began scrolling for the next 45-minutes completely unaware of everything else happening around him.

Wait a minute.

This was the 70s! There were no miniature digital screens for people to hide behind. Ok, so back to the scene. Tesfaye stood around, saw people he only vaguely knew, and as he scanned the room, he saw this gorgeous 24-year old woman with beautiful, feathered hair and pretty dimples, also similarly purveying the land.They talked to one another –with no distractions and no pings, beeps, or vibrations in their pockets competing for attention– and as the conversation progressed, he started to like her.

Later on that night, enveloped in a scent that was a fusion of Marlboro Lights, Black Label, and Chanel No. 5, Tesfaye and his new, pretty young thang danced to Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Mouhammed Ahmed, and Tilahun Gesesse. During moments of awkward silences and music gaps, they scrolled on Instagram, showing each other funny posts and responding to pressing text messages. Sike! Even brick phones wouldn’t be invented for more than a decade. So they filled in awkward gaps in conversation with smiles, silence, and observations of the fine details about one another and their environments. Imagine that. Confident in the silences. Unashamed of being vulnerable during the small awkward pauses. 

After the party, they exchanged phone numbers to a home landline, where her younger sisters would inevitably pick up the phone when Tesfaye called, asking who he was and why he was calling. Or maybe Tesfaye used an elaborate scheme to have his own sister call Wagaye, passing off the phone only after his sis verified who was on the other end of the line.

Anyway, the two dated, fell in love, and Tesfaye proposed to Wagaye. A few years after that, I came into existence. Thanks to that fateful night, you now have your favorite blog writer. Don’t thank me, thank the non-existence of cell phones at parties in the 1970s. ;)