Love in the Time of Instant Noodles

In this era where technology is as fast as a blink of an eye, everyone seems to be always running out of time. Move quick, then good, you are ahead of the race. Lag behind, and you’ll get trampled upon.

This is the reason why we are all crazy about almost anything immediate. Marketing dudes need only to put ‘instant’ or ‘fast’ in their products or services and voila! It could mean lots of moneybags.

Forget about exercise! Lose weight instantly with these pills.

Do you want to earn money in an instant? Let’s have coffee and talk about it. Power!

We insta-print your photos, t-shirts, tarpaulins, and whatever, while you wait!

Oh, how we want everything in a snap. Products should be delivered fast, or else they should be free. Want to show your newly painted nails to the world, right now? There’s Instagram to the rescue! Even decent meals are replaced with instant noodles, just to have time for more important things, like Facebook.  

This should not be the case in love.

***

We were not friends in an instant. I can't bear his smell after a typical play day, and how he finds much happiness in torturing grasshoppers and dragonflies. The feeling was mutual, though. He would later confess how he despised my messy ponytail, crooked teeth, and geeky glasses.

That was when we were seven. Puberty came, and made things much worse. We found new friends in our new schools and barely talked with each other.

But one day, just like how Harry Potter got his letter from Hogwarts, there was just this one ordinary day, which turned magical.

We were together in our yard. He brought some bread for merienda. “Masarap diyan, pancit canton”, I said, so I went to the kitchen to showcase my three-minute expert cooking skills. We ate and talked until it was time for dinner.

As I write this, my brain is being a hard drive, retrieving all the tiny details about that day – the white-collared shirt he wore, the metal ring that was on his thumb and not on his ring finger, and the highlight: our raucous laughter as we read a love letter that was too grammatically incorrect, even MS Word will give up spell-checking it.

The best things in life are indeed, unexpected. That day, I knew that something beautiful began, and it was too beautiful that I don’t want it to end, so I willed it to be very slow, to savor every precious minute of it.

And to cut everything short, after that day, came so many other days that we just felt so comfortable and happy being with each other.

Our friendship, little by little, bloomed into love. But there were also some setbacks. Our parents firmly ordered we should graduate first. We were that generation that could only choose whether: A.) Argue with parents then leave the house permanently; or B.) STFU and follow orders. A was not really an option by the way.

So, at the time when our college friends were drinking their first tequila and exchanging animated stories of their latest carnal adventures, we read our textbooks and studied for our exams. I wrote essays and got anemic in shooting short films, while he tinkered with his calculator and cursed Calculus. 

We did not totally understand our parents that time, but looking back at it now, I am just really glad we listened.

2010, we finally marched with our black togas and got our diplomas, which were the passports so we could finally be ‘legalized as a couple’. After graduating, we shared the stress of job hunting and acing interviews, until we landed our first jobs. It was a great period of adjustment, but we managed.

Then came the joy of giving a little back to our parents from our own pockets, of exploring new restaurants to dine in, of finally buying stuffs we like (aside from those we need), of lazy afternoons at home spent by playing scrabble or learning guitar together. All those years, we allowed things to unfold on their own and learned to appreciate every moment. We ‘just chilled’ – as how kids of today would put it. And how very beautiful it turned out to be.

Ours is a love that patiently waited. We upheld our values although people considered them as ultra-conservative bordering into jurassic. In the midst of shocked looks, raised eyebrows and “Imposible naman ‘yan!” exclamatory remarks, we remained faithful to each other and to our values. It was a mutual choice, albeit a hard one.

Years later, pressure came from people who really can’t contain themselves meddling with other people’s personal choices. “Hindi pa ba kayo magpapakasal? Tagal niyo na!”, were words we often heard towards our 8^th year of being together. We did not give in though, because we have already carefully laid out our future plans.

And then, when the time was right, or so he thought, he kneeled and gave me a ring. On that very moment, I said “Yes” in an instant, but it was a yes that was build up and cemented by so many years of love, patience, hard work, and commitment. It was not a spur-of-the-moment yes just to be posted in Twitter, but a yes shared by two people, a yes to a love to be kept alive.

Now that we are married, you guessed it – people are still rushing us, this time, to have kids. But we still believe in living our lives one step at a time.


There is something inexplicably beautiful, even magical, in taking things slowly.