The Good:
You can meet a shitload of people these days over the
internet. Back in the day you met
potential mates at a bar, church, a party, etc. It required you to remove your ass from the
couch, get all gussied-up, and actually walk out of your house if you wanted to
meet someone (unless you were looking for a nice Jehovah Witness, in which case
you just needed to answer the door). There
were far less potential partners to choose from. Maybe you met one or two at a party, three or
four at church and a half a dozen at a club. This is not the case anymore. I can sit on my couch in my pajamas with bedhead and no makeup and meet dozens of guys online. Based on their profiles, I can also determine their level of literacy (kind
of a deal-breaker for me) before the sappy love-notes even
start (that I would feel the need to correct for spelling and grammatical errors
and return to them). I can “ignore” them
if I choose, or email them if I want more information. It’s awesome in an incredibly lazy kind of
way.
The Bad:
Choose a previous Antics blog post. Read it.
Insert story here.
When I was younger and fell head over heels in love with a
guy (and it ended in a fiery inferno), I admit that a few times I would show up
at his work or his house to see if he was (a) where he said he was going to be
and (b) with someone else in that place he said he was going to be. Some people would call that stalking. Stalking is such an ugly word. I prefer “Curious As To His Whereabouts And Company”
(or CATH WAC). Doesn’t that sound
better??
Whatever you want to call it, back in the day before Facebook
and cell phones, one could only CATH WAC someone for a relatively short period
of time before they had to be at work or do their laundry or get other shit
done. These days, with all of the technology we have
at our disposal, you can CATH WAC someone from the comfort of your own home, or
car, or sitting on the fucking toilet for God’s sake. Sometimes, it is whether
you choose to not.
For example:
A good friend of my daughter’s
broke up with her long-term boyfriend when she left for college. She was pretty upset that the relationship
had ended. She did her best to put on a
brave face but her first mistake was remaining friends with him on Facebook.
Inevitably, every time he made friends with a new chick, it came up on her news
feed (Hello, Salt! Please jump into my wound!).
Then of course, she would creep on those girls’ FB profiles (let this be
a lesson to you, HIDE YOUR FB PROFILE FROM PUBLIC VIEW!!) She tortured herself daily, hourly and even secondly
at times; literally watching him move on from halfway across the country! (Clearly we have come a long way from sitting in our cars in front of someone’s house.) To make matters worse, when she wasn’t creeping on FB, she
would get text messages from “friends” telling her all of the shitty things he
had done/was doing while she was away. She couldn’t get away from it even if
she had wanted to.
Eventually she got smart and blocked his ass on Facebook and
told her friends to knock it the fuck off, but the damage had been done. What should have taken a few weeks to get
over and begin to heal took a lot longer because technology kept pulling the
scab off. (Yes. That would be the ugly part.)
Seriously, how many people do we know that may have
stalkerish tendencies that soon turn into full on get-a-retraining-order-whack-jobs because of the ease of technology? My guess is that it is far more today than ever before.
And don’t even get me started on camera phones and camcorders! I am forever looking for holes in the walls of
department store dressing rooms…
So what do you think? Has technology helped or hurt the dating scene? Has anyone had any similar experiences with
break-ups and technology?
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