Today I Learned...

(I'm such a liar at the "Today I Learned" segments- I rarely learn these things that same day I'm writing, I should rename is "Recently I Learned")


That social media enables women to act crazy when they first begin to date a man.  And that most women in this day in age of social media, all act the same when they first start dating a boy.  This post, boys, is for you.  It goes a little something like this:

Me with my first computer

When we (I'm going to generalize us women here) go on our first date with you, we may, or may not, have added you to Facebook, followed you on Twitter, friended you on FourSquare, followed you on Pinterest (if you have it) or added you to my circle in Google+.  I'd say I would have checked out your MySpace page, but that was so 5 years ago!  Who knows, if I'm really interested I may check out your YouTube channel or your favourites to see what's going on there.  Basically in a nut shell, we'll have tracked you down in every possible way via the Internet.  If we can't find you on any of the more popular social media platforms we may ask you a question such as, "so weird, I was looking for my friend Joe Smith on Facebook the other day, and thought 'oh I should look up (insert man of interest's name here) while I'm online so we can be friends, but I couldn't find you.  It was probably just me, because you have Facebook right?"  This is our nonchalant way of asking you while trying to seem not quite interested (because clearly we didn't go online looking for you!) but just interested enough so you know we're into you.  If we're lucky enough, you don't have a private profile so we can see all your "dets" without adding you as a friend prematurely thus freaking you out.  We want to avoid this, and instead of, you know, NOT checking you out online, we just do it as covertly as possible.

Once we have found your online presence, we are going to scour your pages! And I mean, potentially, hours of time spent.  We always think we're going to find important information there- we're looking for likes/dislikes, exes, your posts, your friends and just generally what you're saying.  More specifically, have you mentioned me?  If we do find your exes, expect that we'll try to check them out as much as we can.  What do they look like?  What do they do?  What are their interests?  How did you guys converse?  And by no fault of theirs (or yours) we'll likely hate them immediately.  And in turn hate everything they like and try to never bring things like that up in our conversations.  When talking to our friends we'll find ourselves saying things like, "can you believe she had a cat?!  haha a cat!  What kind of people like cats? ugh".  (Then we'll give our mom's cat away.)

There are going to be things we see on your profile(s) we want to bring up to you, but don't really know how without showing you that we obviously spent hours researching you and your walls.  Posts like, "just graduated from high school and totally had a wicked time with that chick I met the other day".  Clearly, this post is at least (in my case) 7-10 years old.  Which means I have literally spent hours scrolling and reading through your wall.  How can I possibly bring up this "fun" event and discuss it with you without letting you know what I've done (which I know is excessive and, in essence, wrong)?

The answer is I can't.

But I will still call my friends and tell them the situation and ask them what to do.  I'll get one of two responses.  One is honest and the other isn't.  The first is the dishonest one, with the friend who wants to pretend she's better than me- or at least better than my behaviour- "OMG! you did what?  you're obsessed.  The answer is to stop doing this, and never mention it to him- ever!"  Ya, ok friend.  Thanks for the obvious advice.  We all know we shouldn't do this, but we all know we will anyway!

The second friend is going to try and be helpful.  We will keep calling friends until we find the "helpful" friend.  She's going to say something like, "haha you're crazy. OK, here's what you do... first start casually talking about highschool..."  She'll probably suggest asking you questions and hope that you open up with the story.  This never happens, or works- you guys never remember nor think to tell us about your old stories.  And although we know that, we're still going to try it anyway.  And you may react oddly and start to think we're crazy.  When this happens we'll simply laugh and brush it off, yet obsess about it for the rest of the night.  Most times, we will never get to the bottom of your mystery post.

Once we are more stably dating you, we will start posting "cute" things on your wall.  This is to achieve one of two (maybe both) things.  One: to show you we are truly interested in you and want you to know we're thinking about you.  Two: to show all the other people (read: women) who are perusing your wall(s), that we're dating you.  Basically, we're peeing on you (or your wall, I guess) to mark our territory.  But we'll deny this to the end of our relationship if anyone ever confronts us on it, and we'll just say it was option one.

We will also post things on our own wall(s) to try and elicit a reaction from you, or just get your attention in general.  Things we like will become more evident, in hopes you'll strike up a conversation about it next time we talk.  Or we may post about something you like, hoping you'll comment on it online- or offline.

what guys think we look like while on our computers

Basically what I'm saying here, is that women get crazy when we start to date someone.  And with social media paving the way to make it a smooth and easy ride for us, it's just going to get worse!

(Brandon, in case you're reading this... I never did these things.  Well, not really.)
Hold on, I'll be right back, gotta go tweet about this antique desk I just saw in hopes Brandon will notice it...