15 דרכים דיגיטליות להפתיע את האהבה – יותר מקוריות מפרחים

Óscar had spent a long decade buying a small bouquet on Fridays on his way out of work. It was a lovely gesture, but it was also an automatic one. Marta realized one Friday that that week's bouquet was already half-wilted by Monday. It wasn't the flowers' fault — the gesture had just stopped speaking. Marta showed him LockLove one Thursday night. The following Friday, instead of the bouquet, Óscar left her a wallpaper with a photo of the usual flower stand, this time empty, with a line written with his finger: today I brought you what was left inside me. Marta saw it at 5:40 p.m., in the car, stopped at a red light. She sat through two lights looking at the screen. She got home crying in a good way.

Leire always said that digital romance was cold. Valentín didn't try to convince her. What he did was install LockLove without saying a word, pair up with her, and for three weeks send her small wallpapers with photos of absurd things he spotted around town: a crooked bike, a cat asleep on top of a radiator, a poorly written sign in a bakery. He never mentioned the wallpapers over WhatsApp. Neither did Leire. One Sunday night Leire said, you know I've been looking at my phone way more than I usually do, right, and Valentín smiled. Digital romance wasn't cold. It was that nobody had ever bothered to make it warm.

Their kids installed LockLove for them as an anniversary gift, half as a joke, not really expecting them to get into it. Aurora took four days to ask whether she could send Bruno an old photo she'd found in a drawer. Bruno, who'd spent the last ten years swearing he didn't understand phones, learned in one afternoon how to reply with another wallpaper. They've been going eight months now, sending each other scanned old photos with short lines written with trembling fingers. The last one Bruno left for Aurora was at 7:22 p.m. on a Saturday: a photo of them dancing in 1983 with the line 'this hasn't changed.' Aurora has kept it as her wallpaper a month later. She hasn't wanted to change it.