Yesterday I was berated by a friend for being intimate with a guy that I didn’t have on Facebook. I had been slightly unsure about this tryst already, and hearing that it was “definitely weird,” and “something I would NEVER do,” from a friend whose opinion I highly respect was mildly unsettling in normal terms, and about a 7.5-8 on the Richter Scale when multiplied by existing exam stress.* For about 15 minutes, it opened up a true cavern of self doubt, a fear of possibly dangerous strangers, and a general feeling of excessive sluttiness. And then I came to my senses.
I think this actually requires a little more info on the situation. First of all, this is not a completely random guy. Although we met randomly—we don’t have any mutual friends, and he doesn’t go to my school, we have been going out on little dates for a little over a month (remember dates? It’s when you go out with a guy somewhere. Sometimes he pays for you. Sometimes you eat food, sometimes you drink things, sometimes you make awkward jokes. It’s different than a guy inviting you to THE BIGGEST PARTY EVER on Facebook then handing you a warm Molson Canadian that’s 3/4 head when you get there). I know what his parents do, how many siblings he has, that he can’t voluntarily crack his knuckles or any other bone in his body (thank god, I hate hearing other people’s bones make noises) and I’ve met his roommates. I know where he lives because I have been there. He knows where I live because he has been there. And we haven’t added each other on facebook because we just haven’t gotten around to it. When we want to see each other we text or call. Isn’t this normal?
Apparently not. Apparently, many of us have fallen into a trap where we deem social media connections more important than actually getting to know someone in real life. Apparently when faced with a choice between the nice guy who you’ve gotten to know in real life for weeks on end and the guy who adds you on Facebook 3 hours after you meet because you know his friend’s roommate’s ex girlfriend who happens to have dog sat once for your cousin even though your cousins live in Calgary (totally just made that up. Thank god I don’t have cousins in Calgary), the clear choice is the latter.
Apart from the “weirdness” of the situation, my friend then brought up the obligatory “what if he has a girlfriend that you don’t know about?” My response to this is multifold, and includes the big question of this post.
1. He’s travelling. I know, I know, now you, my lovely reader are mad at me for being involved with a traveller. To that I say: don’t fret. I have been a traveller. I know the Traveller’s Ways. I know what and what not to expect and I know that if I get hurt it’s my own damn fault. Don’t worry about little old me. Anyway, he’s not from Canada, if he had a girlfriend she’s way back in his homeland, on a whole different continent than him, and pursuing LDRs like that is just not something normal, non-delusional people do.
2. If he’s the type of guy to not tell me about a girlfriend, do you really think he’d be the type of guy to post the oh-so-official “in a relationship” Facebook status? No. The answer to that is no.
3. And here is the big question: What did people do about this before Facebook? Now, I doubt there are any statistics on this sort of thing, but I’d be willing to bet money that Facebook does not contribute significantly to lowering the overall cheating rate of society. I think that if people are going to cheat, they are going to find a way to do it, regardless of what their Facebook says. Of course that begs the moral question: if I was to learn from Facebook that he does indeed have a girlfriend, would I stop seeing him? And I have to admit, I would probably ask him about it. But hey, at least I got to have my fun first!
Anyway, back to the important thing: if it’s so wrong to not have someone on Facebook now, then why was life and dating so successful before the advent of Facebook? How much more about someone does Facebook actually tell us, assuming we’ve spent a fair bit of time with the person? And the things that it does tell us—are these important for us to know? Is it important to us to see 1000 pictures of someone with various groups of friends? Does that truly help us figure out new things about the subject that we wouldn’t have normally gotten from spending time with them? Are people we have on Facebook less likely to lie to us because they know a simple Facebook stalking would debunk it? Where is it easier to detect a lie: in the social media realm or in real life?
These are metaphorical questions and I don’t endeavour to answer them in this post.
(side note: holy crap, “endeavour to answer”?? Apparently I write like a British philosopher tonight.)
I think some people might say that if you basing all your judgments on how a person presents himself to you inevitably invites some self censoring and a biased view of that person character. To that I say: what is Facebook if not self censoring? Every facebook profile is constructed with care. I’ve left all of the info fields blank on mine because I like to convey a sense of mystery. In combination with my personality this should seem almost laughably ironic, but to my casual Facebook acquaintance, I am simply a person who is probably female (but the gender is blank) and I am too busy with real life to list all my favorite TV shows. Of course this is a lie. Everyone has time to fill in those fields—but no one does, and we do this (or don’t do this) all consciously. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that Facebook is by no means a less biased way judge to character. I’d even go so far as to stipulate it is the most biased way, but that is for another post.
Anyway, in the end, I think I would like to add him on Facebook eventually. Not for stalking purposes, but because when I left his house last time I saw him, I had already closed the door to his building by the time I realized I’d left my phone there. I had to buzz his unit again to go up and get it, because without it I had no other way to contact him. It was late at night, and I’m sure this buzz was incovenient for his roommates. Since this would not have happened in the olden days, because I would have had a home phone, I see this as a valid reason to add him on facebook. Problems created by technology get solved by more technology. This is what we who come of age in the new millennium are taught to believe.
However, in the meantime, keeping him out of the Facebook realm and boxed into only the “real” part of my life is keeping things deliciously temporary. Par example: Tonight we had plans which I cancelled on, because I felt sick from eating too many latkes (see this post) and when I texted to cancel, I cited some alternate dates we could meet. I haven’t heard back from him and who cares if I ever do—I don’t even have him on Facebook!
* It’s worthwhile to note that after Friend delivered this news to me, I immediately sought a second opinion, from a male of the same nationality as my love interest in question who deemed it an “8 out of 10 if 10 is totally expected, and 1 is something that’s truly socially wrong.” Aka, not “OMG TOTALLY WEIRD I WOULD NEVER DO THAT.”
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