Farewell Facebook!

I deactivated my Facebook account Friday night. Why? Well, there was this guy I met online a while ago. We were emailing and texting and then about two weeks ago we became Facebook friends. But a week later he unfriended me and I haven't heard from him since. What went wrong? Heck if I know! And honestly I don't have enough self-esteem to find out. In fact, the reality that I don't know provides a comfort that really knowing what went wrong can't. Instead I'm just going to let me imagination run with it.

And where has my imagination gone? To Facebook of course. All online matchmaking services tell you to be careful about people you meet online. As a result, I run extensive ongoing background checks on the men I start talking with. I google names, places of employment, and anything else that I feel will help me acquire a better understanding of who the person is and confirm that they are being honest and safe or dangerous. Having access to Facebook is awesome because Facebook provides a wealth of information about the character of a person. You can learn about their families, friends, interests, and lots of other stuff. It is the mother load of data, which brings an indescribable warmness to my engineering soul.

In that case, what's the problem? Well, the problem in my imagination is that the difference between "She's trying to find out more about me," and "She's a stalker," is just a matter of perspective. And let's face it, past experiences and fear is always a safer and more popular route to pick than hope and trust. So, if he has that app (or whatever it is) and can see that I'm looking around for information, and perhaps a family member mentions I'm looking around at their profiles too, it's not hard to connect the dots to paranoia. Goodness knows I don't have the time or energy to be a true stalker, but how would he know that?

I can't confirm that this is really what happened, and I can't change the fact that the person I really enjoyed talking to is no longer talking to me. But, I can end my relationship with Facebook so maybe I can avoid this from happening in the future.