So, according to a study, 88% of Americans stalk exes on Facebook:

Lukacs tells me that the survey respondents were 18-35 and the interview respondents were 21 to 39. They were all people whose hearts had been torn asunder in the previous 12 months. It is always best to research on those whose feelings are near the surface.

But did this stalking add to their pain or were they in pain and therefore stalked the ones they’d lost?

May I offer you some details of this research that might add to your pain?

Not merely did the vast majority stalk, but 70 percent admitted to using a mutual friend’s profile or even logging in as that mutual friend to do their stalking.

They creep around to see if their ex is having a sleep around.

Is that not painful enough for you? Well, 74 percent crept around the profile of their ex’s new partner or someone they feared might be their ex’s new partner.

Only 88%?

My friend Clint was having a lot of difficulty getting over his ex-girlfriend who he was sure was the love of his life (I don’t mean this as snarky as it sounds, there weren’t many girls he felt this strongly about or who matched his desires so closely). She unceremoniously dumped him and he had a hard time letting go. He was one of those people that did some funny business to get access to her MySpace stuff. I won’t recount how he did it, but it was pretty clever and she had no idea.

The end result was… sublime. He was reminded of the things that he didn’t like about her. Things that he had forgotten about in the intervening weeks. He got over her relatively quickly.

I am really, really glad that by the time that MySpace came around (and later Facebook, of course), I was out of the dating market. It’s the sort of thing that I have a really hard time resisting. I hated being completely cut off, of course, but it was always for the best. It was also easier then than it is now.

A slightly different subject…

A Facebook Friend who put up a picture of my fourth grade class recently put up our 8th grade class. It’s drawing in a lot of comments from people I knew way back in the day. I’d actually be interested in 1-day passes to find out what has happened to them without the mess of actually friending them. (This is a different subject because I never had a single girlfriend from my school system. The lady friends I had as a minor went to other schools.) Anyhow, from the pictures I’ve seen, I would have expected more of them to be fat. I think I’ve been conned by popular entertainment kharma. You know that bitchy hot girl who treated you like trash? Well, she’s 30-something now and is still hot. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.


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9 Responses to Facebook Stalking

  1. Scarlet Knight says:

    I don’t like the word stalking used in this context; it trivializes actual stalking.

    Anyway, in your original post about the 4th grade class picture, you said it wasn’t YOUR class. Now you are saying it was. So which is it?

    You also said at the time that you were going to alter the picture to make it less recognizable, yet you never did.

    Will you be putting up the 8th grade pic?

  2. trumwill says:

    I don’t like the word stalking used in this context; it trivializes actual stalking.

    Good point. This is ordinarily something that raises my hackles a bit, though in this case, for some reason, it didn’t.

    Anyway, in your original post about the 4th grade class picture, you said it wasn’t YOUR class. Now you are saying it was. So which is it?

    You are correct. It was his class.

    You also said at the time that you were going to alter the picture to make it less recognizable, yet you never did.

    I had everything in place to do so, but forgot. Done now.

    Will you be putting up the 8th grade pic?

    Debating it.

  3. Scarlet Knight says:

    I hope you do. I enjoy your commentary.

  4. Kirk says:

    Every time I try looking up someone on Facebook I end up with hundreds of people all having the same name. Most have no pictures. How are you supposed to find anyone on that site?

    As for the functionality of the site–when I go to “newsfeed,” it now shows something I posted four days ago at the top, with more recent postings hidden lower down or disappeared altogether. And it’s random. Tomorrow it’ll look different, with the post that’s now on top gone, only to reappear a week from now for no apparent reason.

    Also, bizarrely, the tab in Chrome sometimes has a mysterious number in front of Facebook. For example, now it says “(3)Facebook”. Other times there’ll be a 2 in front of it, or no number at all. Why?

    This is the site that people make such a big deal over? This is the site they made a movie about, where people spend hours and get addicted to it?

    It’s like I’ve been peer-pressured into doing a naughty habit, and I’m trying like hell to get into it but just CAN’T.

  5. trumwill says:

    Kirk, the number should be the number of unattended notifications you have.

    I hear ya on finding people. One thing to do is to find a person in whatever social circle you’re interested in with a unique name, friend them, then look through their friends. So, through Jonas Kurklinsky, you find Tom Smith. Like that.

    I still haven’t figure out how its feed works. For all that I post on it, I don’t actually spend all that much trying to pour over everything. I just kind of read what’s in front of me and that’s that.

  6. Scarlet Knight says:

    Kirk is the dorky kid trying smoking for the first time, but can’t figure out how to do it.

  7. Kirk says:

    Kirk, the number should be the number of unattended notifications you have.

    Unattended? I guess that’s it but Jesus, my calendar keeps getting tour-date notifications for a band whose website I visited one time. I don’t need to know when they’re playing a venue 1,200 miles away. I really wish I could stop those feeds.

    As for finding people, I’m not terribly motivated. I just feel a bit left out of the whole experience.

    Kirk is the dorky kid trying smoking for the first time, but can’t figure out how to do it.

    Sort of. Also, it reminds me of when Knocked Up came out. I hated that movie, but everyone else loved it. It just feels weird, to be uninterested in something so popular.

  8. Φ says:

    Well, she’s 30-something now and is still hot.

    Give it time.

    My own experience, now that I’m in my forties, is that fewer and fewer of the girls that, um, inspired my imagination back then still compare favorably with my own wife.

    One thing to do is to find a person in whatever social circle you’re interested in with a unique name, friend them, then look through their friends.

    Actually, you don’t even have to friend them, since almost nobody protects their friends list, not even me.

  9. trumwill says:

    I actually meant to mention, that they’re hot, but in a rather specific way that I don’t personally find attractive. Like hot in a SoCal way. Hard to explain. But dangit, they should be fat.

    A surprising number of people in my circle do seem to protect their friends list. It’s the one thing that seems to be more protected than it used to be. Heaven knows why.

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