88 percent stalk their exes on Facebook

With apologies to a great band of the '80s.

(Credit: Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

My engineer friend, George, got brutally stood up the other day.

"How did you react?" I asked, trying not to contort my face in fear, as he can get emotional.

"Well, I de-friended her on Facebook," he said. "She's dead to me."

It turns out he may be one of the healthy ones. Because Facebook is where all of love's stages are enacted. And one of those stages comes straight after the breakup. It is the stalking stage.

A master's candidate at Western University (which I don't think offers a master's in Love Studies) decided to examine the extent to which former lovers cannot let go, in the socially networked sense.

As Niagara Advance tells it, Veronika Lukacs discovered that a full 88 percent of lovers follow their exes around on Facebook.

What she really wanted to know was whether Facebook somehow contributed to an increase in post-love distress.

Naturally, she didn't come up with a pure answer for her thesis, titled "It's Complicated: Romantic breakups and their aftermath on Facebook." Certainly, 88 percent of people she studied stalked... [Read more]