From Gossip Girl to Catfish to Vine, social media has officially taken over how we share our lives. UNH is a huge campus, so most of us use media like Twitter, Facebook, and now even Tinder, making it feel smaller without much personal interaction. This adds even more confusion to the already difficult dating world. When do you friend request someone after meeting them? Do you follow someone on twitter even if you’ve met only once or twice before? Social media allows us to become an open book; we can know everything about someone before we actually meet them, and a person’s online presence can greatly affect how we perceive them in real life.
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We can study someone’s Facebook, know what they do on weekends, what clubs they are involved in, and see if we share any mutual friends with each other, but does this type of social stalking help when looking for love? Everyone has different rules for virtual communication. Some of them include waiting 2 days to Facebook friend request someone, holding off for a minimum of 4 hours before responding to text messages, and there’s even rules about tweeting lovey-dovey quotations or song lyrics. I’ve even heard it’s okay to stalk a potential interest’s Facebook profile, as long as you are sure not to mention the color of the tie they wore to prom, or the girl who they had their arm around in a tagged photo at he beginning of the semester. But what happens when the person can see that you read their message and that you are deliberately ignoring them? We are all playing a different type of hard to get. It is common knowledge that most of us are constantly on our phones or laptops, checking every website every few hours. How do we act distant when communication is just a click away?
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 “If someone doesn’t have funny tweets it’s a turn off. And if they tweet at other girls while we’re hooking up, even if there just friends, it raises questions.”
“I definitely looked at my boyfriend’s Facebook before we started dating; you have to know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“Sometimes when he sees a picture of me where I was going out, he’ll make comments like wow that shirt is really see through, or who is that guy in the picture with you. It won’t really cause any fights but I can tell that it obviously bothers him. He gets jealous over nothing, all from just seeing a picture.”
“If his tweets aren’t funny, I will stop talking to him. Not sorry.”
 “Should you stalk someone’s profile? No. Do you? Yes.”Â
Lately it seems like social media at UNH has taken off, with twitter and Facebook accounts popping out of nowhere. With these new accounts and new ways of communication, there is a whole new world of rules and social norms. Will people be telling their children “me and your mom met when I posted to UNH Crushes?” What happens on social media stays with you for your entire life. It can affect your dating, professional, and personal life. Most of us don’t realize that while we are looking at someone’s Facebook page or twitter history, someone else could be looking at ours. The only thing you can do is think before you post.