I Stalked My Boyfriend On Facebook & It Wrecked Our Relationship

I thought it wasn’t a big deal to check out my boyfriend’s Facebook profile regularly. It’s not like I was hacking into his account and reading his messages. Plus, we were friends on the social media site. The problem is that what I thought was “harmless stalking” totally ruined our relationship. Here’s why it was a bad idea and I regret it.

1. Stalking made a big deal out of nothing. I found myself overreacting over things that really wouldn’t have got under my skin in real life. For instance, one day I saw that my boyfriend had gone to his mate’s house without telling me. I felt so betrayed, as though he’d lied to me about something important. So what if he’d decided to visit his friend after work? He didn’t owe me every single detail of his life. On Facebook, though, those harmless details felt like huge problems.
2. I took stuff out of context. It’s really easy to misunderstand things that are posted on someone’s wall. When my boyfriend’s ex posted a cute message to him with a winky-faced emoji at the end of it, it felt like she was flirting with him. When I asked him about it, he laughed it off but I felt like there was something there and I started to stress about it.
3. I intensified my investigative work. His ex’s friendly comment made me want to stalk him—and now her—even more. I was checking up on their profiles every day, but I knew that if they really wanted to do stuff behind my back, they could’ve done it in private messages or in RL. Still, I wanted to feel like I had some control over what might happen between them, so I was stuck in a “refresh page and scrutinize everything to death” cycle.
4. When he mentioned her a week later, all hell broke loose. Weirdly, his ex came up in conversation a week after I’d seen her friendly post on his wall. I made the connection between the two things and we ended up having a big fight about it. WTF? Afterward, I felt silly. I’d drawn connections where there really were none.
5. I wasn’t dealing with the real issues at play. I was stalking my boyfriend online, but this wasn’t really doing me any good. It was a distraction from what was really going on in our relationship. I had trust issues and I felt like I was being kept out of the loop of his life, but I didn’t confront him about it. WTF? It was so unhealthy!
6. There was always someone to suspect. After a while, it wasn’t his ex I was worried about, but one of his friends. She was sharing some of his posts and they’d talk a bit on his wall. I’d read their messages and wonder if he was interested in her. I’d look through her Facebook photo albums and stress that she was prettier than me. It was so ridiculous! I was always finding someone to suspect as the woman he’d cheat on me with, yet he’d done nothing more than exchange some messages with another woman.
7. I couldn’t stop. I was addicted to stalking him on Facebook. Even though I knew it was becoming creepy AF, I just couldn’t quit it. A study that was published in CyberPsychology & Behavior found that Facebook users get caught in what’s known as a “feedback loop.” What this means is that when they notice a strange or mysterious wall comment on their partner’s Facebook timelines, they become suspicious, which causes them to keep monitoring their partner’s page, which results in them finding even more suspicious info. Yup, I was there, stuck AF.
8. I had to break the habit but it broke me. One day, the truth came out about my online stalking. Even though I’d always been sure to delete my browsing history, it wasn’t enough. Before I could stop stalking him online and be done with that nasty habit, he found out about it.
9. I slipped up and exposed myself. My boyfriend told me that he’d done nothing much on the weekend, a weekend when he’d been away with his family on a trip I couldn’t go on because I had to work. I knew he was lying—I’d seen on his Facebook timeline that his friend had talked about them going to the pub to hang out with some old friends. I couldn’t tell him I saw this, so I tried to press him for details by asking more questions. He knew something was up. We ended up having a fight and I told him what I’d seen on his Facebook profile.
10. He logged out of our relationship. He said he was tired of how I’d been creating drama where there wasn’t any. He told me I didn’t trust him, so why was I with him? Good point. He told me we shouldn’t be together anymore because all this crazy stuff was getting to him.
11. I felt like a total sleazeball. I felt like a bad person. And yes, I felt crazy. I regret stalking him on Facebook, but I guess there had been some reason for it even though that doesn’t make it right. I didn’t trust him. I did feel like he was hiding things from me. Sometimes, I wanted to fight with him as though catching him out in a lie would’ve given me some satisfaction. Maybe I was so intent on finding something because I knew, deep down, that this wasn’t the right relationship for me and I wanted out. Whatever the case, it had been a dirty, dodgy thing to do to someone and I won’t let Facebook become the third person in my relationship again.