Kristine Gasbarre, YourTango blogger once said, “you should know that right this second I’m heading to Facebook to change our relationship status” to her ex-boyfriend. Check out her blog entry on dealing with breakups over Facebook.

When you think of the word Facebook, aside from the movie The Social Network, what else comes to mind? Facebook has been getting a lot of negativity lately as social tool that breaks up relationships. Facebook in three simple words: it ruins relationships. It’s quite hilarious really because rather than blaming ourselves for the breakup, we decide to blame it on technology. A website composed of Custom Style Sheets and HyperText Markup Language is the source of all our problems. So basically without Facebook, our relationships would continue on without any external issues. Well now, that’s great, and to think before Facebook, relationships were over due to our own inability to maintain that relationship, and now, it’s all because of Facebook.

So is Facebook really the root of all relationship problems?

According to The Globe and Mail’s video, Like it or not, Facebook ruins marriages, it does. In summary, Dianne Gilmour, a registered clinical counsellor, concludes that it’s the main reason behind a breakup. This is through the reconnection of past friendships and relationships, leading to deception. Now that’s just absurd. What has our society become? Why must we blame it on an online social tool. A relationship doesn’t just end or start on Facebook without personal intentions in the first place. If there was already a problem in the relationship in the first place, the relationship can’t be fixed by avoiding Facebook.

You may think that I am one of those I-love-Facebook-so-I-am-quite-biased type of blogger, but believe it or not, I do not have Facebook at all. You may call me old fashioned, but I like communicating with people in real life rather than over a “wall”.

To me, communication is key, anything that is over the internet does not seem legitimate. I like hearing laughter rather than seeing “LOL”. Also, I don’t believe you can really know a person if you don’t communicate with them as often in real world as you do in the virtual world. Personality can be faked online, but you can catch a fake personality in reality.

In my Communication Studies course, there was a lecture on Nonverbal Communication. Facebook is a form of nonverbal communication. Although it is often regarded that nonverbal communication is unintentional, it can also be intentional. Facebook is a tool for us to hide our identity, and allows us to construct it the way we want to be interpreted. The vocal and nonvocal communication attributes from nonverbal communication can be deliberately altered the way we want, similar to Facebook as I mentioned a sentence before.

We are in charge of Facebook, we construct Facebook. The root of all relationship problems lies within us. We choose whether or not to look up an old friend/lover. We choose whether or not to accept a friend request. We choose whether or not to write on a wall. We choose whether or not to play the role of ultimately being the one ending the relationship. Facebook doesn’t hold a knife against your neck and say “flirt with him/her”. Well at least it hasn’t been recorded in the news yet that I’m aware of.

So let’s man up and blame ourselves for the way our relationships ended, Facebook is not the cause of it. And, just for the hell of it, if you all really believe that Facebook is the cause of it, you should be aware of the breakup times on Facebook. 

Remember, Facebook doesn’t change your relationship status, you do.

Sincerely,

ineedmycoffeeintake.tumblr.com 

You’re hungry. You want to eat. It’s been a long tiring day at school and you are famished. You’re getting a little light headed because you haven’t had anything to eat since 10:30am and it’s now 6:30pm. However, you just spent an hour at the gym and just remembered that summer is coming. Summer is the equivalent to the beach. The beach is the equivalent to a slimmer and toned body. All of a sudden, you grab a bottle of water and start watching shows online to distract your hunger. Between switching back and forth of watching shows and doing your readings, you now realize that it is 12am and you’re starving. Yet you chose to sleep because you realized that you can just eat tomorrow. However, you don’t. Sound familiar?

Well, maybe not to you. We live in a society where beauty is measured by a set of hidden standards. Do these standards ever change? No. Do we change for the standards? Yes. My professor, Alex Sevigny once said, “We are our worst critics.” And I completely agree. The way we perceive ourselves is definitely not the same way others perceive us. We may agree to their perception, but we certainly do not have the same perception.

In The Globe And Mail’s article, The big fat question: How do we actually lose weight?, it is, in summary, concluding that no matter what you eat, you will gain weight, the only way to prevent weight gain, is not eating. *insert sarcastic tone* Awesome, isn’t it? All those years of eating and now we just realized that eating is the reason we gain weight. And to think, all along I thought eating makes you lose weight. *end of sarcastic tone* 

Although the article, in my opinion, is preposterous, it was definitely written for an audience, and that is the audience who wants to learn the secret to weight loss. I believe they are the type of audience who wants to skip the common sense knowledge of losing weight and jump right into eating an exotic fruit or splurging on expensive diet pills. They are the audience who wants to be perceived more than what their weight tells them they are.

In my Communication Studies course, my professor talked a lot about perception. My focus is on perception and culture. Yes, being overweight is an unhealthy lifestyle, but starving yourself is not a healthy lifestyle at all. It is not just those who are unhealthily overweight, but also those who feel like their weight is not of societal standards. In our culture, we tend to seek the beautiful; and being beautiful means being skinny. Yes, it is absurd that our society has turned our insecurities to permanent flaws of a perfect world that only exists in editorials. We perceive ourselves too harshly, trying to mould ourselves through the media’s cookie cutter. It is the media that makes us insecure, and it is the media that makes us not want to eat. Now, by no means am I saying it’s easy to get rid of our insecurities by ignoring the media. No, it’s hard. The media has already embedded in our minds what perfection is. And that my friend, will not change. So we starve ourselves to fit into an outfit one size down from our usual size because within those 30 seconds that you meet someone, they are judging you. And you do not want them to categorize you as fat. You’d rather starve than have someone you just met looking at you as just a fat person.

Now, I’m going to tell you something shocking. Yes, people will judge you, but within those 30 seconds, it is your personality and behaviour that they will be judging. So step back, relax, and eat something. Eat healthy and exercise, do it the right way. Lose weight for yourself, not for society. There are no miracles, there’s just you.

Sincerely,

ineedmycoffeeintake.tumblr.com

P.S. If you’re ever feeling “fat” because of just an off day, here’s a humourous blog entry that I found quite amusing: Don’t You Realize Fat Is Unhealthy?