Love and Facebook

Every time I log onto Facebook I become increasingly concerned about the state of our world. The romantic failings of my acquaintances are announced to me by an icon of a broken heart, nobody gives a second thought to revealing their home address anymore, and I have application invitations from people who want to numerically rank my personality and attractiveness against that of my other friends. \nAnd yet what probably bothers me most about Facebook is when women fill their “About Me” section with random facts about themselves like “I dance in the rain,” “I sing in the car” and “I’m totally clumsy but I know how to laugh at myself.” These images would normally be lovely and hopeful, but when they appear in Facebook profiles they strike me as uncomfortably depressing. All of these publicly broadcast facts could be effectively replaced by the same one line: “Love me, please. Find me endearing.”\nWhile some of these “About Me” sections are funny or creative or simply stated, most read like the script of an over-the-top chick flick. I always picture a vague scene at the end of some generic movie where the male love interest has finally resolved the misunderstandings he has caused and is now proving that his love is real by listing all of the endearing little details he knows and loves about his female counterpart. Don’t we all long for attention from someone who loves us so specifically?\nOf course we do, but the way we go about it on Facebook projects a larger problem with our approach to romance and other kinds of relationships today. We hide behind computers because we are lazy and scared. We are unsure of ourselves and don’t often trust that someone will want to take the time to find out on their own that we “don’t like ice in our water,” “love to run outside barefoot” and are “a Daddy’s girl, through and through.” It’s easier to let others screen us by the facts we choose to immediately reveal rather than allowing someone to gradually get to know us offline. After all, that would require taking the horrifying risk that they might not, in fact, love every quirk that they will come to discover about us. \nI agree that loving someone, whether romantically or platonically, is about their details. But these things are meant to be discovered rather than announced. So many things are instant today, but becoming close enough with someone that you learn their every eccentricity should never stop being a gradual process, no matter how eager we are to be loved for everything that makes us unique. \nUsing Facebook as a forum to beg others to see us as distinctively charming only announces to the world that we are impatient and untrusting about relationships. Old-fashioned romance is not dead, but it doesn’t have a Facebook account. I still believe in chick-flick endings; I just don’t think we will find them by the cute little images we try to project of ourselves online.