Your Lolo Had to Sing. You Post an Elbow.
Twelve questions on paasa, MU, tampo and the soft launch, and the one part of courtship we never imported with the words.
Pat, who runs this desk, learned what ghosting meant about a year ago. Somebody used it in a sentence and he nodded the way you nod when you have decided to look it up later. Situationship had to be explained to him twice. Catfish he knew, but only because of the scams.
MU he has known his whole life. Mutual understanding. Two letters that describe an entire arrangement, and every Filipino over thirty understands them without anyone drawing a diagram. That one is ours and it is old.
So somewhere between MU and situationship, the vocabulary got away from him. This is about that gap. There are twelve questions at the bottom so you can find out which side of it you are standing on.
What ligaw used to cost
His grandparents ran a courtship system with a price tag on it. Harana, which meant standing outside somebody’s house at night with a guitar and at least two friends who could actually carry a tune. Flowers. Gifts. Sitting in the sala making conversation with a father who was not going anywhere. Time, a great deal of it, and no sex until the wedding.
The whole thing was slow and public on purpose. You could not court somebody quietly, because the point was that people could see the effort. Effort was the evidence. If a man was serious, the street usually knew before the girl did.
What the apps did to it
Then the apps arrived and did one thing, and the one thing was enough. They handed everybody more choice than any generation before had ever had.
That is the part he keeps circling. When there is that much choice, nobody settles, because somebody better is always around the corner. You do not have to sing outside a window when there are four hundred profiles in your pocket. Effort stopped working as proof, because effort only proves something when the alternatives are few.
The vocabulary followed the behaviour. Ghosting, catfishing, breadcrumbing, soft launch. We use all of them here now, in English, untranslated, because the behaviour landed first and the words came with it. Watching the generation coming up behind him do ligaw, he is not sure we are running a different system from the Americans anymore. It looks like the same one.
There is a shirt in our own store that reads Catch Waves, Not Feelings, and the product copy ends with a line about leaving a ghosted text on seen. We printed that before he knew what ghosting meant, which tells you roughly how far behind he was. It is here, if the sentiment applies.
The part that never got imported
Except the consequences did not travel with the words.
When his mother found out, she did not say anything. Not one word. Anyone raised in a Filipino house knows that silence is not neutral. It is a sentence being handed down, and you serve it for days without ever being told what you were charged with.
That is the part no app touched. You can ghost a stranger from an app and never see them again. You cannot ghost a barkada. You cannot ghost a tita who saw you at Ayala on Saturday, a parish, or an office where somebody’s cousin works. The imported words were built for cities where a person can genuinely disappear. Cebu is not one of those cities. The circle here closes.
So we borrowed the vocabulary and kept the accountability, which is a strange thing to live inside. You can be soft launching on Instagram while your mother already knows the person’s surname.
Twelve questions, and a low score is not a loss
Half of these existed here long before anybody swiped. Half arrived in the last ten years. Answer all twelve and you get a title you can send to whoever needs to see it.
Score high and it means you have been through some things. Score low and it probably means you were spared. Both are worth posting.
Suroy.ph lifestyle quiz
How much of this vocabulary got past you?
Twelve questions, about two minutes. No names, answers or results are sent or stored.
Which one should die first
That is the question we actually want answered in the comments. Not the best term. The one that should be retired, taken out of circulation, never used again by anybody.
One practical note, because it comes up. If somebody you have never met in person starts asking for money, an OTP or a photo of your ID, that is not a dating problem. It is the same playbook the booking scammers run, and it ends the same way.
