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13 Years
13 years! Thirteen. So today (local time in Asia) we mark 13 years. It all started in 2011 when our paths crossed at a birthday party. We started chatting and it turned out we had both studied the same thing at university, even if Rianne got her Computer Science degree a few years before me. After the party we exchanged contact details and then lost touch for a while. Then a mutual friend contacted both of us and asked why we were no longer communicating. We started talking again and then met again, this time not in someone else's birthday party. I took out Rianne to eat her favourite food - pasta - in an Italian restaurant. We chatted for hours and hours - we never ran out of topics. There was good mental chemistry and we didn't talk much about computers. Computers weren't even a leading topic, just a side issue. Back then Rianne used a mobile phone; she wasn't one of those frantic clickers, scrollers, and zoomers. She didn't let that thing control her life. That was a good thing. In dinner, she'd look at the person she was with, not stare at a small, glowing screen.
Many years passed and little has changed. We go out every week to eat outside and chat for hours. It's not so much about technology; we don't have any gadgets with us. We don't need any and don't miss the Internet.
If you look for someone you can love and trust, be certain or bother to make sure there's a mental connection. As people age, and every person ages (some people just hide it better), what matters is inside the head, not the clothes one wears or the number of fake "friends" in some online Social Control Networks.
Rianne has "zero friends" online because she's not in any Social Control Media site. But she has real friends, including myself. And this is mutual.
Our holiday ends soon; days from now. I bought some gifts for the anniversary. Rianne will soon find out. The gift is living; it's a live thing, not some object. We love animals. █