These days, new communications technology allows us all to conduct our social affairs at the touch of a button or the click of a mouse. Text messages, email and chatrooms allow us instantaneous access to friends, acquaintances and perfect strangers across the world without ever having to speak face to face, new dating and social networking sites spring up every day, relationships and marriages are made (and broken) via these channels on an even more frequent and burgeoning basis. But all these technological and social changes are largely confined to the past fifteen or maybe twenty years. To try and gain a sense of how romance was conducted i the days before every house had even a television set, let alone a wireless internet connection, we talked to Mary Walton, 84, who married her late husband Ralph on the 14th of July 1942. They remained married until Ralph’s death from a stroke in 2000. Mary recalls vividly her first meeting with Ralph:
He was this handsome young soldier, home on leave from fighting in the war. I’d known him vaguely before the war as he lived only a couple of streets away and our fathers knew one another from around the way. Anyway, it...