For Valentine's Day, my hallmates and I reminisced about our past flings and crushes. Everyone had their own stories, which caused a great deal of laughter and teasing, but I sensed a common theme running throughout.
It's been a long time since we started talking about our love life in elementary school, so you might think we would have matured slightly. Unfortunately, we discovered this was not the case. We are just as girly and giggly and slightly obsessive as we were when we first started to like boys, but now our techniques have changed. Gone are the days of punching our crushes in the arm and taking their swings at recess to get their attention. Passing notes in class has evolved into flirty texts and pokes online. We have become more cunning, applying all of our intelligence to tracking various boys and trying to get them to talk to us.
As it did in years past, it all starts with figuring out the boy's name. In elementary school, this was a simple task. You walked past his desk and read the name on his table tent. These days, it is more difficult. I'll admit I'm guilty of "accidentally" dropping a homework folder on the floor so that I could get a better look at the boy's belongings to get his last name so I could find him on Facebook. Similarly, one of my hallmates "accidentally" looked through her crush's art portfolio to find his name.
It's a fine line between this and "stalking." In elementary school, we watched a boy at lunch to see what he was eating, or followed him to the playground to see if he played jump rope or climbed on the jungle gym. Now, Facebook is our savior. A quick succession of keystrokes takes us directly to everything we need to know about the boy: musical interests, academic studies, potentially mutual friends.
Here we must be very careful - it's easy to venture into dangerous territory. It's all too tempting to use these Facebook tidbits to try to strike up a conversation with the object of your desire. Some are good at this. You could ask a simple question related to one of the Facebook breadcrumbs he left
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