From Christine Rosen's essay, "Romance in the Information Age," in The New Atlantis:

Among Pascal’s minor works is an essay, “Discourse on the Passion of Love,” in which he argues for the keen “pleasure of loving without daring to tell it.” “In love,” Pascal writes, “silence is of more avail than speech…there is an eloquence in silence that penetrates more deeply than language can.” Pascal imagined his lovers in each other’s physical presence, watchful of unspoken physical gestures, but not speaking. Only gradually would they reveal themselves. Today such a tableau seems as arcane as Kabuki theater; modern couples exchange the most intimate details of their lives on a first date and then return home to blog about it. "It’s difficult,” said one woman I talked to who has tried—and ultimately soured on—Internet dating. “You’re expected to be both informal and funny in your e-mails, and reveal your likes and dislikes, but you don’t want to reveal so much that you appear desperate, or so little so that you seem distant.”

Rosen pulls together lots of threads — some familiar, some unexpected — about the nature of love and what sending it over wires in bits does to it. But, for me, the heart of it is in the excerpt above: We live in an age increasingly deaf to the unspoken.