Keep It To Yourself
A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine who is a frequent reader of this blog asked me why I never post about guys on here. To him I would say that it is either because I have nothing going on and I spend most of my Friday nights crying into a bowl of Reese’s Puffs, or because I think that for stuff like that, maybe you should not be blathering about it all over the Internet. I realize that these days everybody is like, “Privacy is overrated,” as they attempt to contort themselves to take a picture of their asshole that they’ll post on Instagram, but call me old fashioned, because I still think you should keep some things to yourself.
I’ve never gotten the urge to be like, “OMG, look at this adorable thing a dude did for me – I must tell the Internet!” and punched out the nearest stranger so I could grab their iPhone and update the world, and frankly, I don’t understand people who do. Maybe if your boyfriend did, like, a crazy good job of making your Valentine’s Day ridiculous, then yeah, you could take a picture. But if all that bitch did was send you flowers (and the delivery guy smelled like onions, so minus 10 points on choosing a service that doesn’t hire non-disgustings), maybe you just put the camera phone down and enjoy them for yourself, yeah? Cool? Thanks.
I guess I would get behind it if these updates weren’t always from randos I don’t talk to anymore. Not because they’re awful people, but because we weren’t particularly close in high school. To be honest, if I didn’t really care about your life then, how am I supposed to drum up any interest in you four years later? Exactly. I’m not. If Facebook could develop a mechanism so that stuff like that was only shared with people who would care, that’d be fine and I’d encourage you to post away about your boyfriend. Unfortunately, such a thing does not exist because I feel like those updates are maybe seen by one or two people who care and then a bunch of people who forgot you were a person.
My least favorite thing about Facebook, even more than unnecessary updates about your relationship, is the “relationship status” option. That friend from the first paragraph once told me he doesn’t have his relationship status listed on Facebook because he thinks it seems desperate to have “single” on there. I don’t agree, because I think it’s just stating a simple fact, but I get where he’s coming from. What I do think is desperate is listing yourself as “it’s complicated” when it’s not a joke. Doing that seems like screaming, “MY RELATIONSHIP IS TROUBLED,” which is super sad for you, but, like, don’t do that shizz on the Internet. I do have one Facebook friend whose relationship status was “it’s complicated” for a long time. Why do people do that? Then people ask you about it, and you either get all shady about it like you don’t want to discuss it on Facebook, which LOL YOU OBVIOUSLY DO OR YOU WOULDN’T HAVE MADE YOUR RELATIONSHIP STATUS “IT’S COMPLICATED” UNIRONICALLY, YOU FOOL-ASS BITCH, or you give up way too many details, which is never fun for anyone. Except for this one time – the only time I’ve ever enjoyed Facebook relationship drama.
It was a couple years ago, when two guys had a huge, nasty back-and-forth conversation through comments on one of their relationship status changes that was just so bitter and angry I couldn’t look away. Also, every couple comments, a third party would be like, “Stop it you guys, this isn’t a conversation to have on Facebook,” and they would just continue bitching at each other, pretending like they didn’t see any of these people begging them to take the high road. It was great, but that’s the exception, not the rule. Otherwise, I do not enjoy seeing your drama all up in my newsfeed, thank you very much. Those two guys eventually got back together, because of course they did. If they ever break up again, I would be 600% down to see them verbally bitchslap each other through status comments one more time, because god damn, it was magical. That kind of total lack of self-awareness is rarer than unicorns, so you need to appreciate it while it lasts, and then hope that people are stupid enough to do it again. I’m still waiting to see if they are. I’ll keep you posted.
