by Alex Watkins (News Editor) – Email
If you’re one of the over 500 million human beings with a Facebook account, you’ve probably by now discovered that it offers up a whole new range of relationship-related neuroses.
One glaringly obvious example: before the advent of social networking, a gal could eagerly accept the one-week post-date analyses offered up by her compassionately dishonest girlfriends, feeding the flames of her raging denial in a manner akin to dousing a forest fire with gasoline. “So what if he hasn’t called yet,” they’d say. “He might honestly be busy… maybe at his mother’s side in the hospital, dabbing her forehead with a cool cloth as she suffers from some unpronounceable and thoroughly exotic disease that she picked up in Tahiti. Maybe he’s been trampled by an errant moose or is lying crumpled in a heap at the bottom of an open manhole. Personally, I wouldn’t sweat it, hun.”
At one point in time, these may have seemed like perfectly plausible explanations for a suitor’s lengthy absence… but not since Facebook. The experience of rejection is no longer a slow waiting game, concluding with the bitter realization that you’ve been dissed, but something as sudden and painful as the bikini wax you’ve prematurely subjected yourself to only days before.
Come on, I know you’ve all been there too: sitting in front of your laptop and slowly developing a repetitive strain injury from constantly clicking “refresh,” you come to the stinging realization that he’s alive and well (and up to level 12 on Mafia Wars), not on a top-secret CIA mission or fallen down an elevator shaft but simply choosing to ignore you.
Your stomach drops. A dull flush creeps across your face. What went wrong?
Maybe he saw that embarrassing picture of you from last Friday night – the one with the exposed buttcrack and the spinach between your teeth – before you hastily untagged it? Maybe he took one look at your favorite quotes (“I can eat a man, but I’m not sure of the fiber content” – Jenny Éclair) and decided that maybe you weren’t so compatible after all? And who is that hussy who’s started harvesting his crops (or whatever the crap it is you do on there) daily on Farmville, anyway?
In all seriousness, Facebook does pose some interesting new challenges in dating, many of which we are still collectively unaware of how to handle while managing to keep any pre-existing level of grace and dignity intact. For one thing, social networking increases our level of intimacy with near-strangers very suddenly, perhaps more so than is healthy in the unsteady beginnings of a relationship; a quick scan of someone’s page can reveal any number of things about them, from something as trivial as their musical tastes and interests (electrofolk and luging are so hot right now) to something as controversial as their political and religious beliefs, or – unfortunately – their popularity with their preferred sex.
And although some prefer to be very cautious in what they post online, many people’s pages are a bona fide graveyard of failed relationships – some that crashed and burned with all the force and fury of a nuclear warhead, leaving behind a wasteland of snarky wall posts and the requisite drunken photos of newly free agents locked in violent tonsil-hockey matches, subtly labeled: “OMG GUYS, being single is soooOoo fun!!!1!”
Yet as much as we moan and complain about the difficulties posed by social networking sites, it’s clear that they’re not going away anytime soon. After all, deleting your Facebook account will likely leave you as much of a social pariah as that hipster who decided he liked hygiene better before it went mainstream. Like the telephone, and smoke signals before it, I suppose we will just continue this process of trial and mortifying error until we establish some sort of common etiquette that – let’s face it – we’ll all probably just ignore when drunk anyway. Until then, we’re all just going to have to keep cyber-stalking our exes, mining the pages of potential partners for intel, and posting the Ace of Base lyrics that most accurately describe our heartbreak.
