The (Facebook) Love Generation

By Catherine Portland

I remember the days when stalking someone meant you actually had to leave your house. I'm not saying I haven't done it (not saying I have, either, mind) - but at least it involved a bit of dedication. It sorted the sheep from the goats. If you weren't really that broken-hearted, you found you couldn't really be bothered to trail round after your old love wearing a dodgy mac and unfeasibly large sunglasses in the middle of the night. Stalking the ex, and his new love, required commitment.

Now we all belong to the Facebook love generation. Millions of us are drawn inexorably to the portal that allows us not only to keep tabs on our exes, but very often on their new better-halves. I put it to you that, on some quite fundamental level, this is just not healthy.

A tale that illustrates my point. As an impressional young thing I was dumped, rather unsympathetically, by the love of my young life. He surpassed himself by doing the deed by payphone, along the following lines: "Listen I've only got 10p I'm calling to say you're dumped because there's a girl here in this club who's much fitter than you and" - silence as his change tinkled into the coin box.

I thought that was the last time I'd ever hear of him. I spent months being snotty into my pillow and vowing I'd never love again. I secretly rather liked the finality of it, the dramatic tragedy of two ships passing in the night, faces that would never look on one another again, blown apart by the ill winds of fate and all that.

And then came Facebook. Over a decade later, I got a friend request from the very same man, curious to see what had become of me. Well, of course, I had to accept - wouldn't you? I was dying to know what he looked like, whether he'd improved and most importantly, whether he had a girlfriend who was prettier than me. Yes chaps, women do worry about these things.

So now I can keep tabs on him - and other romantic entanglements from days of yor. As someone once said, "am I bovvered?" - not really. I don't want him back and I still haven't really forgiven him for the 10p incident. Yet from talking to friends I find I am not alone. Women all over the world trawl through the Facebook photo albums of friends of friends of friends, desperate to find evidence of the girl their ex went out with years ago.

There's something addictive about the whole thing - and it's a self-perpetually phenomenon. I'll bet most girls are still searching for that one elusive ex who's opted out of joining Facebook altogether. Of course, the implication that he must actually have a real life makes him doubly enticing. Yet perhaps there are some guilty pleasures we should be denied. As I scrutinitise pictures of the girls who may or may not be the new love of my old flame, I sometimes wish that 10p phone call really had been the end of it.