Full disclosure: I’m a single lady. I absolutely believe that being single can be just as necessary and/or rewarding as being in a relationship, depending on circumstances, outlook, and the people in your life at any given time. Dating should never be a project.
However, I know a lot of people who constantly lament their singlehood. Some, but not all of these people, scare away potential suitors via social media! I just want to sit them down and tell them they are sabotaging their chances of finding true love. For the clueless, here are 10 ways that social media is keeping you single:
1. My Facebook news feed shows that every single person you befriend is of the opposite sex. I am very skeptical of men who only have female friends/women who only have male friends. I won’t necessarily check the male-to-female ratio in someone’s friend list, but I do notice when something is obviously skewed.
2. You only use Twitter to follow attractive people, celebrities, or models of the opposite sex. I will seriously roll my eyes if the people you follow aren’t even tweeting anything of note. I subtract more points if you’re actually telling those people, via Twitter, that you think they’re sexy. You know the phrase “Get a room”? I say, “Take it offline”. And if that’s not logistically possible, then you have a problem.
3. You created a tumblr account for the sole purpose of reblogging images from the Erotica (NSFW) section in tumblr’s directory.
4. Your Facebook profile states that you are “Looking For: Random Play”.
5. Nearly every one of your Facebook profile photos has a cropped arm that belongs to a member of the opposite sex. Profile pictures with exes and random hotties are too obvious to mention here.
6. You have a MySpace profile.
7. For some reason, you think it’s a good idea to use foursquare to check into peep shows, cheap motels, strip clubs, massage parlors, etc. Keep your hobbies to yourself!
8. You have a blog. No one wants to date self-absorption, navel-gazing, or oversharing. See this recent TFLN submission: “(503): I just realize today that I’ve dated three guys this year with their own blog. Ugh that’s embarrassing.”
9. You willingly share details about self-imposed celibacy with the New York Post and then proudly tweet about it.
10. You have an active social media presence. Though I don’t necessarily agree, my brother thinks that any guy who has time to tweet is not worth mine. Discuss.
Note about the photo: My friend collects these singles signs, which were littering the sides of New Jersey roads in the summer of 2009. I pulled over to the side of a very busy highway in Kearny (note the misspelling on the sign) just so I could snag this, a coveted and rare sign, for him.
Come now, Laryssa. I not sure you are being particularly fair with some of these. I think you are deeper than that.
1) Could you at least elaborate on why this is problematic to you? Why friends of the opposite sex in large numbers (how large??) is such a turn off?
The others I either can agree with, or have no opinion on whatsoever. The worst being that celibacy proclamation crap. That was just pretentious as shit.
That smiley face icon was supposed to be a number “8″ in reference to that number on the list. I don’t know how it became an emoticon.
Is it a bad thing that social networking is a window into the psyche? I am a believer that more can be learned in 10 minutes on a facebook page than can be learned in 5 dates. Pictures, posts, links and interests paint a pretty decent picture. So, with this in mind, is it a good thing that we are telling the creeps exactly what makes them creepy?