From a Psychic Advisor on Keen
Has your boyfriend added a new "top friend" to his MySpace page? Is she trying to look her hottest? Have you noticed a younger woman showing up recently on your husband's Facebook profile? Are you left wondering who they are and how they even know him?
It wouldn't be MySpace without tattooed girls and it wouldn't be FaceBook without a seductive looking secretary or two. There is a fine line between doing your rightful snooping and getting carried away with jealousy where there need be none. The online social networking phenomenon is still in its infancy. Perhaps we will all look back on it as fondly as your grandparents recall radio or black and white television with only four available channels and no remote. Or it may be like the telephone, an invention that is here to stay. Either way, dealing with your response to social networking sites might tell you more about yourself and your feelings for your man than you realized.
TRUST
Do you trust him? If he is using his MySpace page to promote his band or some other creative endeavor, than many young women as friends only serve to make him look "cool" to the people to whom he is marketing. You have to trust his business strategy. But you can always look through that page in private and see if there are any personal messages to him – you can also check the pages of his fans to see how close he gets to them. This is a classic case of the old saying "Trust, but verify."
If your husband or boyfriend has a less glamorous job and is not pursuing a creative career, you can be a little more roundabout in deciphering the intentions of your man. A lot of men in their 30s have gorgeous young teenage girls on their social networking friends pages that turn out to be their nieces on the other side of the country. This is why you want to tread lightly – blow your top at the first sign of cleavage in your man's life and you might be getting a one-way ticket to Singleville, population: you.
Instead of confronting him, join the fray and get to meet his friends. If his birthday is a few months away, you might start getting word to his friends that you, his girlfriend (or wife), are putting together a big surprise party for him. This way, nobody tells him what you are doing – they do not want to spoil the surprise. Simultaneously, you get to meet all of his friends. If one of the girls blows her top and tells him, well, those two deserve each other and all of his other friends can be surprised when you cancel the big surprise party and explain why.
Another way for you to shadow the borders of trust is to ask him, directly, if he wants to show you all of his FaceBook and MySpace friends as you will be willing to let him see all of your contacts. This can be a casual conversation, over dinner at a restaurant. This gives him time to erase anyone suspicious before you sit down to check on things with him back home. Of course, you have already checked and can note if any profiles are missing. There is no need to bring the missing profiles up at all. Check back a week or two later – are they back? Now you have someone to zero in on.
The whole process of examining his social networks with the least amount of confrontation is a way to preserve the trust in your relationship while you verify that your man is not an internet chic magnet.
SELF-PRESERVATION
The reason that you want to examine his pages and friends on occasion is to preserve your sense of certainty that you need not be paranoid. Occasional examinations of his pages are an act of self-preservation, not an act of nosiness. But a modicum of trust and understanding is needed. Men have female friends and it is ordinary for you to have male colleagues, relatives and friends on your social networking pages as well. Your good standing in the relationship is preserved when you do the background work and only confront in extreme circumstances.
EXTREME CIRCUMSTANCES
When you see your man's pages containing many posts from a woman you do not know, examine the writings. Does she talk to him with a hint of intimacy? Do you recognize her picture? Is he responding to her on her page? If it is friends only, she might need a new friend request from you. Extreme circumstances are when your man is carrying on a relationship that has an intimate side. When a person is in a relationship, the intimate relationship they have in life is with their partner; external relationships that have intimate sides to them should almost always be off limits. You can confront your man on these grounds, but be prepared to educate him on the age of internet boundaries.
BOUNDARIES
We post on blogs, upload photos, and "friend" each other more and more every day. To maintain that one true relationship in the physical world should be simpler with all of this technology but it almost seems more difficult. While we superficially keep in touch, social networking does little to deepen our relationships. The boundaries, though, can be crystal clear. Partners need to understand that there are no secrets about each other outside of the relationship. There should be little or no banter with members of the opposite sex online when that interplay could be with each other in the real world. Working on a business deal, a school project or a creative production gets more efficient with social networking and communication with people at odd hours is to be expected. But the line is crossed when intimate talk is exchanged and an exclusivity forms between two people that leaves one of the real world partners out. You are not really someone's "friend" if you are taking him away from his wife or girlfriend, now are you?
