I’m in Austria for a wedding this weekend, as yet another one of my friends has got hitched to a European. It’s becoming a trend. Of the five closest friends I had when I was 21, four of us – including yours truly – started a cross-border relationship which ended in marriage. This has to do, of course, with love – but also, if I may be so nerdy, with technology and economic trends. My generation, born in the mid-70s, was perhaps the first to be able to enter long-distance relationships armed with the new tools of communication and transport. The old narrative of a long-distance relationship was meeting up every couple of months, slowly finding you had drifted apart and cursing the time you had wasted. Now, technology has closed the gap. Here’s how.
Cheap overseas calls: Now BT’s monopoly has been shattered, people pay what international calls actually cost – next to nothing. First there were prepaid cards, where you bought £5 of credit, dialed some 0800 number and called pretty much anywhere in the world for 2p a minute. Then came companies like Just Dial, where you rang a 3p-a-minute line and it put you through anywhere. Once overseas calls were a rare luxury (especially for those on a budget) now they are routine.
The internet: Skype, of course, makes calls free. There is also instant and free email and scores of other innovations. Twitter lets you find out what anyone’s up to without having even to ask them; if the musical Greece was written in 2008, the line “wonder what she’s doing now” would not be in Summer Lovin’. Technology has removed the uncertainty which used to scupper long-distance relationships.
Easyjet: The cheap airline revolution made weekend commuting affordable for those who had just started working. The best man in his speech last night suggested 1p flights would be intrinsically attractive to Scots, but the trend is UK wide. One of my friends (from Essex) was dating a girl in Montpellier and booked a Ryanair flight for every Friday, returning on Sunday, and if he didn’t use them just cancelled. They’re non-refundable but you get the tax back, which is most of the cost. Such competition forces regular airlines to lower fares. I shuttled to Stockholm with SAS for four years for about £120 return. It was below cost for SAS but with Ryanair running two Stockholm-London services, they couldn’t afford to make it more expensive.
When I was at The Scotsman I once tried (without success) to see if we could redraw a map of the world by time of travel, not by distance, to show graphically how the world had changed. It takes three hours to get from Edinburgh to my hometown of Nairn, for example, by which time you could be in the south of France for less money. This changes not just holiday options but relationship patterns. And perhaps helps fuels Britain’s 1,000-a-day emigration rates (of those five friends, I’m the only one who has stayed in Britain).
That’s why I think Stelios, Michael O’Leary and the internet have done more for European integration than anyone in Brussels. Revolutions in technology and transport have shrunk the continent and the world – and the long-distance relationship has been amongst the chief beneficiaries.
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