Reminiscing: Love, Lies, And The Legendary Buttoned Phone

Before smartphones, before disappearing messages and FaceTime calls, there was the golden era of buttoned phones—where love lived in 160-character texts, delivered on a glowing green screen, and trust was measured by how fast you could delete a message before handing the phone back to your mum.

It was a time when teenagers borrowed their parents’ Nokias and Motorolas "to check the time" or "send credit"—only to secretly dive into a whirlwind of coded texts and late-night flirting.

Relationships thrived between stolen phone minutes and the paranoia of being caught. The thrill wasn’t just in the conversations—it was in the hiding, the clearing of sent items, and that final warning: “Don’t text me after 8, I’ll have given the phone back!”

Young love in those days had no emojis, no screenshots, no typing indicators. You had to wait. Wait to see if your crush replied. Wait for credit. Wait for the right time to sneak off and send “I miss you” using predictive text that sometimes turned into “I milk you” if you weren’t careful.

The sacred ritual of deleting messages was an art form. One wrong move and your mum would find "Please call me my love" and suddenly there would be a family meeting at dinner. If you were extra bold, you even had nicknames saved under fake names—“James Maths Set” or “Rose Study Partner.”

And when the text tone rang out, your heart dropped. Was it just a notification for your parent? Was it them? Or worse, was it them after you already returned the phone?

Those were the days when love felt risky and magical. When a beep from a shared phone could brighten your whole week. When "I love you" meant typing it out, letter by letter, on a keypad with no backlight in the middle of the night under a blanket. And when being caught meant begging your way out with "it was just a classmate asking for homework."

Today’s generation may have Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Instagram, but they’ll never know the adrenaline of falling in love on a buttoned phone that wasn’t even yours.

So this Throwback Thursday, we raise a toast to the teens we were—the secret texters, the fast deleters, and the hopeless romantics who fell in love through borrowed airtime and buttoned courage.