We have never talked about dating, love and romance as we do these days in India. Gone are the days when epic romances, tragic love stories, and defiant couples who fight against society were the stuff of Bollywood dreams. Instead, the digital has undeniably emerged as a formidable force that propels us into reconfiguring how we love and who we love. That frisson of waiting for love letters surreptitiously passed to the object of desire has been replaced by the blue tick of a WhatsApp message delivered in the middle of the night. Facetime has bridged the gap between real time and waiting time, connecting us everywhere and everywhen.

Dating apps like Tinder and OkCupid are doing the rounds, changing the ways in which we manage our multi-amorous connections. Our mobile phones vibrate with messages, throb with desire, pulsate with notifications that make us feel touched, loved and desired.

This should not come as a surprise to us, because the promise of the digital was connectivity, and now that it does connect us, it produces strange, unexpected, erotic and ersatz encounters that enchant our love lives. However, there is another reason why the digital becomes the medium of love. Because like love, the digital is both mystical and ineffable. You cannot see the digital, you cannot locate it, you cannot hold it, touch it, or describe it, and yet, you feel it when it is around. The presence of the digital - the joy of an open Wifi network that makes your phone buzz, or the discovery of connectivity on the road - fills us with elation. The digital is something we crave for, it gives us comfort, and we find solace when we live within it. The digital touches us, and in its touch, it transforms us, into a being that is able to escape the confines of the body, the materiality of our locations, and the contexts of our reality, to become a rarefied thing that floats somewhere there in the cloud.

To be digitally connected, feels very much like to be in love, as it also brings with it the danger and thrill of that intimate connection with somebody new. Sometimes, it comes in the form of the peer-to-peer networks that introduce us with strangers that we would never have known, or it manifests itself in the risk of contagion as unimagined hackers and pirated flash drives infect us with illicit materials and viruses. It is no wonder, then, that we love our devices as much as we love the people they connect to us. Let us accept the fact that we are in an intense love relationship with our digital devices. We care for them, look at them, touch them, and are touched by them in a way that nothing else does. When our devices die, we mourn their demise, when they do not perform as expected, we shout at them, when they clam up, we cajole them into action.

We depend as much on our digital devices and promises of connectivity as we do on the people around us. Especially for young people who access and construct their lives through multiple apps and platforms, it is quite ordinary to think that they love their machines because all their friends and loved ones live on it. The phone is more than just a prosthetic, the app is greater than just an extension - they are inextricable parts of their mental make-up and their emotional connectivity.

It is that time of the year when love is being manufactured and we are reminded to make special time for the people we love. It might be fun to realise how much of this is digitally mediated. From the gifts that we are buying, to the messages that we are composing; from the listicles that we are poring over to find the perfect gift, to the selfies we are sharing to celebrate our love with the world, the digital is everywhere. And while you are there, giving the poetic genius a wrong, writing cheesy poems that you will regret the day after, and selecting gifts that might lose their allure in the harsher light of day, this Valentine's Day, you might want to look at your digital device and maybe tell it that you love