image via someecards
It’s not the worst thing that can happen. Coming home after a first date and logging onto Facebook to see a request for your virtual friendship, from the person you just shared a real life dinner with. In fact, it’s an all-around promising sign that your date enjoyed your time together. They want to see more of you. And they want to be able to browse your profile pics from the line at Dunkin Donuts, as they please.
Maybe the last one is too presumptuous. But does anyone else feel a teeny bit trapped each time they’re flagged down by that red request to stop and declare official friendship with someone, when you’ve barely had a chance to declare your thoughts on Love, Actually? It doesn’t seem right that you should see this listed on my favorite movies page before we’ve made it past the topic of TV. That you’d see the photographic relics of freshmen year before we’ve swapped wild dorm stories. Does a date – just one – really entitle you to full virtual access of your second-date prospects?
I imagine our in-person profiles can suffice as proper getting-to-know-you material; even more, that they surpass our online ones, which are always either overly predictable or overly crafted. It’s one thing if your initial meeting happened online, when pretty much all profiles are free game. But if by some miracle, we managed to time travel to a pre-Internet age where people meet and date and *gasp* talk on the phone! without the false intimacy of a million social networks, I think we should ride that wave as far as we can. Be surprised by our date’s lists of favorites, instead of pre-calculating them based on a faulty algorithm of status updates and recently posted links.
For me, the biggest problem of starting a pre-emptive Facebook friendship with someone you’re dating is not even what happens if you never get to a second date, or that it’s next to impossible to turn down if you’re hoping on seeing the person again. It’s that once we’re Facebook friends, that great big divide between us, the one we’d break down and conquer through numerous bottles of wine (over a couple of dates, relax!) and conversations and jukeboxes, now seems suddenly shallow. Yeah, it’s easy to poke someone online, “like” their status, or post on their wall and feel like you’re getting to know some part of them. But a week of reading someone’s emo status updates does not a relationship make. Not a real one anyway.
Can we hold off on 24/7 Facebook contact for now – and just get to know each other offline? I know it’s not what Janet Jackson had in mind when she sang, “Let’s wait a while/Our love will be great“, but seriously, can we?
