THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => CHATTER => Topic started by: Aimless on 14 Oct 2009, 02:57
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(I thought the original title implied Second Life and World of Warcraft)
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/10/how-to-break-up-in-an-online-worldand-avoid-e-stalkers.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
In this age of electronic communications and social networks, breaking up with someone can be even more of an ordeal than it has been in the past. A divorce or major breakup can be messy enough without the added reminders about what your ex is up to every hour of the day or who he or she is going out with on the weekends. Plus, there's always that risk that your ex is of The Crazy(tm) variety and is using your social networking updates to ensure that you cannot possibly move on with your life if he or she can help it.
For those who keep a tight leash on who has access to their Internet activities, the solution to this problem might seem obvious. Still, there are legions who don't immediately think of the laundry list of Internet ties to cut when they end up parting ways with a significant other. (We have even heard from several readers about dealing with this issue.) It's those people this guide is aimed at...
I have to admit, I've never really had to deal with this problem, and I don't know anyone who's ever had a stalker (to the best of my--as well as their--knowledge). There have been some occasions when it's really felt like a good idea to electronically cut off a girl from my life, but it's never been a big deal for me. As for passwords, mine are sacred and probably not known to anyone I know personally...
How about you guys? I get the impression you and your friends/partners are more immersed in the online world than are mine. Has that given rise to any significant challenges that you'd perhaps not have had to deal with eg. ten years ago?
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Protip: don't date the crazy.
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But all bitches be crazy, bro. True facts.
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Protip: Don't date Gilead.
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OH SNAP
Pro tip: Only date Amish
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How to break up in the modern world: 'so and so is now listed as single.'
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Most of the people I've met here at uni are in relationships.
Most of the people I've met who are in relationships have a relationship status on facebook.
Most of those statuses refer to college marriages, as opposed to real-life relationships.
We were discussing this, and someone pointed out that if you immediately jump to put "So and so is in a relationship with such and such", then you get dozens of comments and likes. But when you become single, you get dozens of private messages. Either way, people who you don't see often and don't really care about or speak to much find out intimate details or your life and feel they can and should commiserate.
People you're close to, whether real life or online, probably find out about significant developments in your life without social networking sites, and everyone else doesn't really need to know.
As for stalkers, or just irritating updates about your ex's new love, you can either block them, unfriend them or just disable the updates. I don't think it's that different to choosing not to meet up and hang out every day.
Also, for god's sake who gives out their passwords to every account they use?
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If you loved me you'd give me your bank account number, Driver's License and a copy of your birth certificate.
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But Jimmy I did give you those and I hardly even knew you
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Good job I'm a soulless shell of hate, then.
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You knew me reasonably well! Either way it serves as proof that I'm not going to steal your identity.
Let's see how far we can push this, what's the password to your Facebook account so I can ruin all your personal relationships show you how trustworthy I am.
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HAHA! I have deftly avoided any of these pitfalls by not being a member of any social networking site! Everyone, you have permission to bask in my glory for 30 seconds AND NO LONGER!
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Social networking sites are useful to keep in contact with friends you don't live near and to share information between said folks but aside from that, I always recommend discretion. I don't use my real name or my actual location on Facebook. I don't have my relationship status showing and I don't actually talk about anything that happens in my real life. My status updates are usually just whatever song is playing at that moment and only around five percent of the time is it pertinent to anything going on in my life.
I always figure that stuff like marital status, religious or political affiliation should be kept relatively private. Putting out too much information is usually asking for trouble.
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Well you are no fun
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Most of those statuses refer to college marriages, as opposed to real-life relationships.
What on earth is a college marriage?
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Coming out of my lurking hole because this thread reminds me of this song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0g4GgewOV8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0g4GgewOV8) (Do click, quite amusing!)
This actually happened to me, too.
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Most of those statuses refer to college marriages, as opposed to real-life relationships.
What on earth is a college marriage?
I would like to know the answer to this as well. Also, both my parents just got Facebook accounts and friended me. Uggggggggh whyyyyyyy.
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I don't see that it's all that much of a problem if you use common sense. LiveJournal's been around since around the time I first started really dating, so almost all of my relationships have been in the digital age.
I've been both followed and done some following of my own on social networks with exes. The extent of my following was stumbling on my ex's DeadJournal when she left it in the internet history on my computer, and that wasn't even an after the fact thing, we were still seeing each other, so I checked it out and found out it was actually a backup to her LJ that she'd made to hide shit from me (Including the fact she was contemplating cheating on me), so I broke up with her the evening I found it. Said girl called me a scumbag for looking at her "private stuff" (Which she'd posted on a public forum, without any kind of lock on it and then checked on MY computer), but I still don't see that I did anything wrong to this day. I originally assumed she probably intended for me to see it so that she could get out of the relationship without having to dump me, but apparently she took the breakup horribly at first and I was just giving her intelligence too much credit.
Said girl subsequently LJ/AIM stalked me for a while and a later girlfriend did the same with a couple friends of hers, but that's the worst I've ever gotten. Since then, I've kept my MySpace and Facebook private and have yet to have a problem result from it. I always remove a woman when I stop seeing her just so I don't have to follow her life. It's not a problem if you don't want it to be, nor is it anything particularly new. We have these things in real life called social networks as well. We have our co-workers, our friends, our family, our friends of friends and we'll deal with these awkward questions and tensions between friends of friends and the occasional unwanted update on their life with or without stuff like Facebook.
This only becomes a problem when both parties refuse to let go, and that's a personal problem and not a new one at that. I've caught more exes spying on me outside work when I did retail or making unwanted calls to my cell phone than I ever dealt with spying on me through social networking sites. Maybe I've missed some instances, but that's not my problem, as I don't follow their lives. It's not hard to remove them and put them on ignore lists if they don't get the hint.
I think the real problem is that people just put too much emphasis on Facebook politics in general. A friend of mine was complaining to me about how his ex is on his ass for deleting all his old pictures of her from his Facebook and he apparently saw it coming. I seem to be in the minority in terms of being willing to decline friends or remove people because I know it's for the best.
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What on earth is a college marriage?
I would like to know the answer to this as well. Also, both my parents just got Facebook accounts and friended me. Uggggggggh whyyyyyyy.
I'm fairly certain Barmymoo means the fact that people are jokingly married to each other when they're really just close friends.
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Facebook doesn't allow for double-marriages, though, so real ones take precedence.
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both my parents just got Facebook accounts and friended me. Uggggggggh whyyyyyyy.
My children seem to feel that I am out of touch because I don't (actively) use FaceBook, and would be pleased if I did. But I can't be bothered, actually, as email and phone/Skype do just fine. I do have a FaceBook account, as there are sometimes things I'd like to see which I cannot get access to without one.
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No, a college marriage is a thing.
I don't know how it works in other universities but here in Cambridge there is a wonderful pastoral system where every fresher is assigned two second year "parents", usually a "mum" and "dad" but as I'm a women's college I have two mums. The second years apply to become parents and have to get "married" so that every fresher ends up with two parents and a sibling. Not all the colleges use this system; at a college just down the road they have aunts and uncles but it's the same principle. The great thing is that at least one of your parents takes your subject (both of mine do) so you have an immediate reference point for any kind of problem and a good source of cheap second-hand textbooks. My college parents are both awesome and have been really helpful since I got here.
Some people take the marriages semi-seriously in a joky way (last week some friends of a friend had a belated marriage ceremony with cheap rings and homemade cake and a pretend service) and some people don't bother with a ceremony but everyone gets involved and it's a wonderful way of creating a ready-made family for when you arrive. A fantastic result of it is that there's an extended family of aunts and grandmothers who are always thrilled to meet the first years and help out; I can't imagine many second and third years would be that interested in freshers if they didn't have some kind of pre-formed relationship with them, even if it's superficial.
Wow, sorry for writing a derailing essay, but I really love this system. One of my college mums got me out of a hole with my essay and talked me through how to read case law, while the other one was very kind and sweet when I was feeling down and also hilariously funny at a cocktail party last night (for funny read drunk).
Yeah. So lots of Cambridge students' facebook statuses are "married".
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Oh, yeah, St. Andrews does that too I guess. Edinburgh doesn't though. I've always thought it's kind of neat, so I've been a bit jealous.
Out of curiosity: how do you guys handle visiting third year students?
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They don't get parents, but they do get support! I think everyone is so used to being nice to people in case they are freshers that it kind of spills over; everyone smiles at everyone all the time! After two years in the welsh borders and sixteen years in yorkshire this is refreshing.
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Most of those statuses refer to college marriages, as opposed to real-life relationships.
What on earth is a college marriage?
I would like to know the answer to this as well. Also, both my parents just got Facebook accounts and friended me. Uggggggggh whyyyyyyy.
My half sister's dad friended me recently, even though I'm not related to him in any way. beat that
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My bitch stepmother requested my best friend and even I don't have her friended. Hell, I don't have my dad. I think I beat that.
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My half sister's dad friended me recently, even though I'm not related to him in any way. beat that
Your half sister's dad friended me. I win.
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This is a thing that worries me on occasion, but I don't overly want to talk about my insecurities to do with my relationship on a public forum. Well, I guess they are not really insecurities, more like I am not being naive and think about potential futures.
Either way, it would probably be kinda awkward around here if there is a breakup, as some of you can imagine.
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People around here tend to leave when relationships begin, not when they end.
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It would also depend on if the break-up was amicable or hostile.
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No worries, we all know whose side we'd come down in the event of a relationship dissolution.
The side that controls the giant robot.
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In my experience, breakups usually end neither amicably or with hostility, but with a lot of confusion and a variety of mixed moods and feelings super condensed into a very short space of time. I don't blame anybody for the way they might behave following a breakup unless it goes on more than a few weeks, you gotta be getting over it by that point. One moment you're in love with the person you just broke up with, the next you hate them and want them to die, then you hate yourself and want to die for thinking it because you think they were perfect, then you think you're being stupid because they behaved like an asshole etc. You can go through the process several times a day for several days following a breakup, it's totally fine.
I think it's important to be patient during that initial breakup period, because unless one party did something absolutely irredeemable, all breakups are amicable eventually anyway. Nobody ever feels the same way forever.
Edit: And you never take sides after a breakup (unless, like I said, one party did something absolutely irredeemable) because it's not your breakup, why should you pick a side? Just don't get involved and wait until that initial breakup period is over. Nobody can be angry at you for refusing to get involved.
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sorry hannah, est is a mod
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Mods are all just cheap whores compared to Ben's pimp admin status.
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Hey!
I'm not cheap!
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Affordable.
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My bitch stepmother requested my best friend and even I don't have her friended. Hell, I don't have my dad. I think I beat that.
yeah
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Most of the people I've met here at uni are in relationships.
Most of the people I've met who are in relationships have a relationship status on facebook.
Most of those statuses refer to college marriages, as opposed to real-life relationships.
We were discussing this, and someone pointed out that if you immediately jump to put "So and so is in a relationship with such and such", then you get dozens of comments and likes. But when you become single, you get dozens of private messages. Either way, people who you don't see often and don't really care about or speak to much find out intimate details or your life and feel they can and should commiserate.
People you're close to, whether real life or online, probably find out about significant developments in your life without social networking sites, and everyone else doesn't really need to know.
Which is why I keep my relationship status off Facebook.
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Crazy girls with your mobile no. are far more irritating than people stalking you with social networking sites.
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Which is why I keep my relationship status off Facebook.
What's stopping you from facebook marrying Gary Busey? *
Honestly, I think there are multiple ways of dealing with what many perceive to be an invasion of privacy. A few of them are funny. Those are the ones that I prefer over simply locking it down.
*Furthermore, young turk, what's stopping you from ACTUALLY marrying Gary Busey?
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I don't see that it's all that much of a problem if you use common sense.
I seem to be in the minority in terms of being willing to decline friends or remove people because I know it's for the best.
I periodically delete people from my facebook when I deem them no longer pertinent to my life. So if I haven't spoken to someone at least via MSN or Skype in the last 3 months or if I just can't remember why I accepted the friend request in the first place then that person is deleted.
My last ex-girlfriend decided to add me on facebook and in the name of being An OK Dude I accepted it and she went on to be incredibly passive-aggressive in all our interactions and attempt to rub it in my face that she is going out with some guy I used to know (the brother of another of my exes). It was a bit weird.
In my experience, breakups usually end neither amicably or with hostility.
I make a point of being an utter cunt to the people I break up with. It makes things easier because I don't have to be friends with them afterwards. I also try to make a point of not having mutual friends so it's easier. Basically I go into relationships expecting them to fail miserably and so organise my life to accomodate that fact.
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My fiancee is much more private than me (she only had a Facebook profile for like a month before deleting it because it was making her nervous, and even gives pizza delivery places a fake name) and becomes annoyed when I post a picture with her in it to my Facebook. How ironic, someone who doesn't care if people on the internet know his address being with someone who doesn't want the internet knowing anything about her at all.
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That's not private Joe, that is paranoid.
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On an unrelated note, I've picked up her habit of cleaning my hands so thoroughly and often that my fingers get dry and cracked from lack of natural oils.
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you don't even need to talk to people about it anymore, just ignore them for a few days and change your relationship status to single, they'll get the picture.
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If you really take that approach, it baffles me that you ever had enough respect for your significant other to start seeing them in the first thing. What a shitty thing to do.
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Joe, tell your fiancee that the internet keeps hassling you to just marry her already. That oughta make her feel better about being online.
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I don't blame anybody for the way they might behave following a breakup unless it goes on more than a few weeks, you gotta be getting over it by that point.
I think what you mean is that by this point they can stop thinking about it 100% of times and no one necessarily has to hear about it anymore. I know it takes me longer (months) than that to get over someone I have been particularly invested in, but at least after a few weeks I can talk about other shit.
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Joe, tell your fiancee that the internet keeps hassling you to just marry her already. That oughta make her feel better about being online.
Maybe it's her that's behind all of the delays.
I mean, she is supposed to be marrying Joe Hocking.
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These were both before Facebook, but they still apply. Not sure if Myspace existed at this time?
Anyway, onetime my past-girlfriend and I were going out and here crazy ex would always IM me and tell me that she was cheating on me and that he was going to hurt me. In retrospect, there were a million ways I could have handled that better (just block the moron) but I wad too intrigued by him. He basically ended up fucking things up, mostly my fault. I was 16 so I guess screwing up is par for the course.
Blakejustblake: That's harsh dogg
Another time I broke up with a girl and we had been having good times but I was 17 and thus too scared to stay in a relationship for more than 3 months so I ended up breaking up and getting back together like 3 times and eventually she made a post on her live journal about how I was being a suck-bag. I asked her to remove it cause I felt it was our private business, not the internet's business, that I was being a total suck-bag.
Last night I was talking to my recent ex-girlfriend. We had broken up relatively amicably after about 3 years. I forget how the conversation went but it ended with her telling me that she never wants to talk to me again, ever.
Maybe I should just never incorporate the internet into my relationships.
Has the internet harmed anyone else's relationships?
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A lot of your post was really difficult to understand, but!
The internet actually made two of my relationships possible, because they were long-distance, and another I never would have met the guy if not for some other people I met through the internet.
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katie stop trolling the internet for sex
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the internet is definitely tough on relationships and breakups in the sense that it's a lot more difficult to maintain any semblance of privacy, especially with the amount of social networking sites on the internet that make it nigh-impossible to not know exactly what your friends are doing and who they are doing it with at all times. i've had difficulties a few times with relationships, even just the casual dating kind, because when you're not with the person it's so easy to get into their life and see exactly who they are hanging out with and what their friends are saying to them and about them and what they are saying back to their friends and photos of them with other girls and all these little petty things that in enough volume can make anyone act really jealous and stupid. even though everyone is aware that these things happen after a relationship ends, there's a big difference between filling in the gaps in your mind and actually having to see those filled-in gaps in full detail on a daily basis. it used to be easier before social networking sites existed to just grant your partner or ex-partner the privacy to do whatever they wanted with their free time when you're not around and enjoy being deliberately ignorant, now it's a little bit harder because social networking sites make everyone's business into your business in the sense that it's often very public and almost impossible not to know about.
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and in the name of being An OK Dude...
...I make a point of being an utter cunt to the people I break up with.
I think what you mean is that by this point they can stop thinking about it 100% of times and no one necessarily has to hear about it anymore. I know it takes me longer (months) than that to get over someone I have been particularly invested in, but at least after a few weeks I can talk about other shit.
Yeah, that.
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the internet is definitely tough on relationships and breakups in the sense that it's a lot more difficult to maintain any semblance of privacy, especially with the amount of social networking sites on the internet that make it nigh-impossible to not know exactly what your friends are doing and who they are doing it with at all times.
This really depends on the kind of people you hang around with. Come to think of it, the only person I know who updates with everything they're doing on facebook has two small children and is blatantly filling in time when they're stuck in the house waiting for them to go to sleep or whatever. Admittedly there's a lot of postings about gigs, but they're Leeds DIY gigs and anyone into that would have seen the flyers and known their ex or whoever would have been at the gigs anyway. Only a small number of people actually spew all the details of their lives onto the internet.
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Interestingly enough not an hour ago my best friend's ex started some very public Facebook drama. It's embarrassing.
I tell people, you break up with someone, stay essentially out of their lives for an extended period of time (at least 6 months) but no, they have to be friends.
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Only a small number of people actually spew all the details of their lives onto the internet.
it doesn't have to be all of the details though. sometime when you have the same friends, even a few details can be more than you're comfortable with.
if i'm seeing a guy and we break it off i can be cool with the fact that he still hangs out with my friends. however, i'd probably be more comfortable with just sort of knowing and acknowledging this reality and having the option to not know anything about it than with actually seeing the posts he leaves on my friend's walls asking to make plans for the weekend or the photos of them all having a good time together or the status updates where they happen to mention him and so on and so forth. the only real option is to just abandon said social networking sites altogether in order to gain that space, but to me that seems pretty drastic when compared to the fact that in person you'd be able to just say to your friends something as simple and polite as "hey, stop talking to me about this guy" and that would be all there is to it. with a social networking site that's designed so that it's all public and absolutely everyone shares information with everyone else all the time under the pretense that they're all friends and everything is awesome, willful ignorance is a little bit tougher.
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You do realize you can set Facebook to not display wall posts from people who aren't mutual friends, right? The only times I see people I don't communicate with on Facebook is when they comment on a friend's status and it's very rare that actually amounts to anything.
I don't know, most of the complaints I'm seeing here about how the internet makes privacy harder are things that I feel crop up being a twenty-something anyway. Not having a Facebook isn't going to stop your friends from pestering you when you get out of a relationship and it's certainly not going to stop your mutual friends from routinely communicating, occasionally doing so in a manner you'll see it. There are so many built in features for ignoring and blocking people selectively on Facebook and its ilk that I can't imagine a scenario where info would get out there without that person either wanting it out there or not having much in the way of foresight.
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if i'm seeing a guy and we break it off i can be cool with the fact that he still hangs out with my friends. however, i'd probably be more comfortable with just sort of knowing and acknowledging this reality and having the option to not know anything about it than with actually seeing the posts he leaves on my friend's walls asking to make plans for the weekend or the photos of them all having a good time together or the status updates where they happen to mention him and so on and so forth.
But as I said, not everyone uses facebook like that. I don't know anyone who regularly puts up photographs of nights out, it's just big events like a wedding or holiday so they're few and far between except for the serious photographers (and those are of wildlife, urban exploration etc, not parties). I know maybe one or two people who very occasionally organise nights out through status updates. This may be because most people I know are too drunk/k-holed/crusty to use a computer enough to spam one with the details of their life, I don't know, but whatever the reason I still wouldn't be able to know almost anything about my girlfriend if we broke up even if I kept her as a friend and the same goes for the majority of the people I have as friends.
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I'm with my current boyfriend because of the internet & we live apart, but only thing we really share online is sending each other mediafire mixtapes and pictures of bears/youtube videos of dogs. We talk on the phone & text a lot.
Although having said that my ex did find out I was dating my current boyfriend via facebook status (Which is not what I wanted to happen, but hey....)
I also shamelessly exclude people from seeing my photo albums. It really doesn't take that long to do. So my lovely ex (Who I am still friends with as he is just too fantastic not to keep in my life, but not right as a poitential life partner.) doesn't have to be bombarded with pictures of me & my new boyfriend. (Mostly taken by others I might add).
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to clarify - i'm not actually talking about myself, the situation i'm describing is mainly hypothetical. when i ended my first serious relationship with my long-term high school boyfriend, social networking sites at that time weren't really all that common so it was really easy for us avoid each other and have no idea what was going on in the other's life despite continuing to have so many of the same friends. we just made plans around each other and our mutual friends stayed out of our business and it was really easy (well, as easy as moving on from a serious relationship can be anyway) to move on. now it's 2009 and on facebook i am constantly bombarded with everyone's business all the time (not that i necessarily object, it's what i did sign up for) but i just assumed that naturally this would make moving on from an ex-partner who shares the same friends as you that much more awkward. you're right though, i guess there are lots of ways around that i hadn't considered.