Oh brave new world of digital dating

I have come to the conclusion that I was born too soon, writes Dan Wainwright.

Had I been a teenager in the latter part of the last decade I could have been a "geek chic" fashion icon.

Instead, dressing as a geek at school just got me labelled as, well, a geek and therefore a social outcast.

Dating did not come easy to me and the fact that I'm engaged to be married is as much a mystery to me as who built Stonehenge or how Piers Morgan has been given his own chat show.

Had I been that gangly, centre parting sporting teenager or gangly, spiky-quiffed university student today, rather than 10 years ago, I might well have been cheered by news that new couples become, er, closer quicker today thanks to Facebook.

Apparently four out of five women think texting and social networking helps them to get "to know" a new partner better than if they didn't have it.

These kids today, they don't know they're born.

Back in my day we had to think up some sort of winning chat up line, go up to someone in a club and actually talk to them.

Then we had to go through the "wait three days" ritual before, shock horror, picking up the telephone and having a conversation.

Oh yeah, I've no doubt these youngsters are currently LOL (that's laugh out loud) or ROFL (rolling on floor laughing) at the thought that we have ever had to do anything more than text a random selection of punctuation marks J to secure a second date.

Enough is enough. At the rate we're going we'll end up reproducing in hatcheries like in Brave New World (the synopsis of which I've read on Wikipedia) where everything is just sped up and made more efficient.

I never felt the need to Google my other half to find out all her secrets and discover who her exes were.

I generally found asking her about herself when we met up was a much more pleasant way to go about things.

Besides, what else have a new couple got to talk about apart from each other?