The way we were
Tamar Caspi
Recently, I started dating a guy. Recently, my mom decided to put all our home videos on DVD. Perfect timing for hours upon hours of cinematic viewing known affectionately as: embarrassing Tamar.
Sure, there are the cute-as-a-button videos of me shoving cake into my face on my first birthday and petting farm animals at the county fair with straw in my pigtails. But there's also video of me lip-synching to Debbie Gibson and one of me wearing a sequined shiny leotard in a so-called "dance recital."
On the other hand, my new guy barely has any pictures, not to mention videos, of his childhood. His parents just didn't bother to take them. He doesn't have to withstand torturous viewing sessions, but he also has no documentation of his birthdays, graduations or sports competitions.
I think this is kind of sad. And it means I can only make fun of the one picture I've seen of him as a teenager, wearing stonewashed tapered jeans with a tucked-in, sleeveless sports jersey and hightop basketball shoes.
My boyfriend and I have enjoyed photographing our relationship: from the night we met, to various birthday parties and weekend trips, we take pictures all the time. If this relationship continues into the future, it means we'll have wonderful memories to share with our family and friends. And our kids will get to make fun of us, just like I make fun of my dad's sideburns and tight jeans and my mom's Jewfro and bellbottoms in a picture of them taken 35 years ago.
Sometimes in the past I felt like I was putting pressure on the relationship by asking my then-significant other to take a picture together. I might have e-mailed the boyfriend the photo, but otherwise it would simply stay saved on my computer.
This time, my boyfriend and I spend time together looking at the pictures, selecting one for the desktop image and putting some on our cell phone display. I decided to eliminate pictures of old boyfriends from my computer, moving the folders to the recycle bin where they will live for all eternity.
It's not that I want to erase those experiences from my memory, but visual reminders are not necessary. I believe that almost every exboyfriend was an essential experience on the path to finding my beshert. But now that I might have found him, I don't need to look at an illustrated chronology.
My parents still have faded and tattered photos of the people they dated before they met each other tucked away in shoeboxes in the attic. But to me, the relationship I'm in is the only one that matters.
The photos my boyfriend and I have taken over the past few months show me happier than I've ever been. People tell me I'm even glowing. And that's definitely something I want to keep forever.
Not only do I have the pictures saved in a folder on my desktop, but I've also printed them, I haven't deleted them from the memory chip in my camera, I've burned them onto a disc and even published them to a photo gallery. When I'm making memories that are going to last a lifetime, I want to make sure the technology lasts just as long.
Tamar Caspi has been a journalist for the past five years and dating nearly half her life. If you have any dating dilemmas you can e-mail her at: thesearchforbeshert@ gmail.com.
No comments have been posted. Be the first! 
)
