Thursday, December 10, 2009

Juggling Several Women On Facebook

girl-on-computer

Dear Miss A,

Since you have become the Facebook expert, what should I do about girls I date who want to friend me on Facebook? I don’t think I should have to explain the pics of me with other ladies prior to their existence.

Also, I did friend a gal I was seeing awhile back and refrained from posting pics of other girls I was seeing at the time to avoid questions. Is there an easy way to get out of friending without coming off as a jerk?

Not a Jerk

Dear Not a Jerk,

Thank you so much for reaching out to me. You should absolutely allow girls you are dating to friend you on Facebook. Red flags will be raised if you don’t allow women you are dating to friend you.

In the new social media world today, it’s more and more difficult to separate business from pleasure online. We use LinkedIn not only with our business contacts, but also to help link our friends to help them find jobs, clients, customers, and new business deals. Similarly, we are using Facebook to connect with old friends, new friends, work friends, and work contacts. I foresee a LinkedIn Facebook app or Facebook LinkedIn app or something to bridge the two.

I’ve always been a one-man kind of woman. I have no interest in going to dinner and dates with multiple men each week. I rarely find a guy I’m really into, and don’t have time to spare with guys I for whom I have no interest. So not that I would know, but from what I hear it’s much more difficult for people to juggle various people they are dating. Facebook and the LNS Forum have made Washington an even smaller town.

I would suggest that you go into Settings – Privacy Settings – Profile and under “Photos Tagged of You” select Custom and in “Edit Custom Settings” choose “Only Me”. This way one girl you are dating won’t tag a photo of you all together for your entire social world to see.

Right under “Edit Custom Settings,” you’ll see “Edit Photo Albums Privacy Settings”. Here you can control who sees each of your photo albums. You can set them so that nobody can see any of them, or that everyone can see a few of them, or even so that certain people can see certain albums.

So if you’re extremely shady, you could set it up so that one girl sees an album including a photo of her, and a different girl sees a different album with a photo of her. I wouldn’t recommend this, as sooner or later shady people get busted, but I know there are lots of guys who think they can get away with murder so try this at your own risk. I just wanted to make you aware that Facebook does have this capability.

Like everything else, new technology has applications to do good, but these same applications can be used to do wrong. You may think that Facebook is helping keep men honest, but there are also ways for them to use it to fool you. As a Wake Forest Politics major, I can tell you that the philosophies of Sun Tzu and Niccolò Machiavelli come in handy in Washington whether or not you are involved in Politics. My discovering that “all’s fair in love, war and the charity circuit” is part of the joke behind the name “Blonde Charity Mafia”. So Ladies, when it comes to relationships, remember the words of my hero Ronald Reagan — Trust, but verify!

I hope this is helpful! Let me know how things go, and what you think!

- Miss A

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