Loving the trend

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.