A Girlfriend’s Guide to Internet Stalking
By: Caitlin, Cc
Tags: Breakups, Humor, Creative Non Fiction, Mental Health, Dating

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Let me start out by saying this: I am a relatively sane person. I tuck my shirts in. I read the news. I eat pizza without folding it or cutting it. I put on both of my socks before either of my shoes. And I when it comes to internet stalking, I have only gone overboard once.

Everybody, and I mean everybody, has their moments of weakness. My big one came to me in college, when I fell in Love for the first time. This wasn’t just some cute, fluffy fit of mutual infatuation dressed in movie dates and social media posts and bad sex. This was Love. This was exercising emotional muscles I never knew I had. This was feeling weak in the knees just at the sound of his laugh. This was being willing to bleed myself dry just to see him smile. This was maintaining all these feelings long after he figuratively ripped my heart right out of my chest and threw it into a paper shredder.

This was Love, and it blindsided me. It turned me inside out. It made me forget who I was.

It also turned me into an extraordinarily skilled Internet stalker.

The first time one of my college boyfriends showed me a picture of his best friend from high school, my stomach dropped. This Ivy League sorority girl, 5’7” and approximately 110 pounds, stood up straight with the sunlight hitting her face, as if God himself had rigged the sun so that it could perfectly complement her face wherever she goes. This city doll’s light pink dress was silky and perfectly pressed, hugging her 22” waist, the outfit being tied together by the genuine pearls hanging on her slim neck. The deep ocean blue of this Hitchcock blonde’s big round eyes was the worst part; little did I know how they would haunt me for months to come.

And her boobs. Goddammit, her boobs.

I later looked at myself in the mirror. I was 5’6” and 154 pounds with disproportionate B-cups. My very long blonde hair was nice, but I had no control over the way it hung off my head like wet spaghetti after a long day. A large nose dominated my face, freckles scattered here and there, little brown constellations staining my otherwise pale skin. My eyes were a dark shade of teal that were just a few tones away from being considered “stunning,” but instead fell in the “forgettable” range. They also pointed downwards in a fashion that made them look glazed at all times unless corrected with winged eyeliner. My wardrobe was inappropriately infiltrated by plaid and Ugg. I was smart, but I wasn’t Ivy League smart.

Why in the world would he choose me?

Curiosity eventually got the best of me and brought out the worst in me. In the eight months I dated this boy, I repeatedly found myself on this girl’s social media pages, developing skills in the art of Internet stalking that are unmatched. And these skills deserve to be shared.

Step 1: Find this bitch.

He’s told you her first name. That’s all you need.

(For the purposes of this essay, we will call her “This Bitch.”)

Go to your boyfriend’s Facebook page, and go through his profile pictures. There is no way she hasn’t liked or commented on any of his profile pictures. That’s just what friends do.

Sure enough, you find a snarky comment written by someone with her name. In fact, you find a lot of snarky comments by someone with her name. Damn, This Bitch is actually kind of mean to your boyfriend. Why in the hell are they even friends, you wonder?

You click on her profile. You go through her pictures. Suddenly, you understand.

You cry for awhile. You purchase a gym membership.

Step 2: Utilize Facebook.

Not knowing someone personally can be a roadblock in the feat to find every piece of information about them possible. Especially when this person is the type to keep all of their social media pages private. When you discover this, you are tempted to give up, get over it, maybe even talk to your boyfriend openly about what’s bothering you. But deep down inside you, in close proximity to the fires slowly engulfing your heart, your soul, and your conscience, you know: this simply isn’t an option.

One day, your boyfriend talks to you in more detail about his high school years. About the time he spent in the music program, playing sports, the roles he played in his school’s theater productions. You find yourself envying him, because your high school experience was fraught with underfunded extracurricular programs and bullies.

“Yeah, I never really had any bullies growing up,” he tells you. He pauses and laughs. “Well… except maybe This Bitch.”

You pretend to think it’s funny. On the inside, you think about the boy in the 4th grade who shoved you out of your bus seat and called you ugly. You imagine being in love with Zach from the schoolbus. Your heart breaks for the boy you do love.

He proceeds to tell you about the other people in his circle during his high school years. Now you know their names. Now you know what to do.

Sure enough, you find her BFF’s Facebook via his friends list. She is not quite so private, and many of her posts involve This Bitch. Looking through them, you piece together an even greater idea of who This Bitch is.

She’s still beautiful.

She’s still best friends with your boyfriend.

Next time you go to the gym, you decide to cut the cardio and begin lifting weights.

Step 3: Take advantage of Twitter’s search feature.

Another way to get inside information on This Bitch is to find her username under your boyfriend’s “following” list and type it into Twitter’s search feature. Even though her account is private, there may be some images of her/tweets about her that are public.

You look through the results. You cry a little more. You look up diets online.

One night, your boyfriend drinks way too much. You take him to your apartment to take care of him. In his drunken state, he says to you, “You know my friend This Bitch? I’ve always had kind of a thing for her.”

He throws up in your toilet and passes out on the ground. You place a pillow under his head and cover him in your nicest blanket.

As he sleeps on your floor, you look at yourself in the mirror, the girl who will never be This Bitch, who will never be close to being This Bitch. You fight back tears and go to bed. In the middle of the night, you wake up to the man you love crawling into your bed and snuggling up next to you.

In his perfect voice, he whispers, “I like you so much.”

You smile. In the morning, he doesn’t remember much about the night before. Amidst the moaning and hair-pulling of your morning sex, you decide not to tell him.

After he leaves, another strategy pops into your head. You start looking at his Twitter profile, and under “Tweets & Replies,” you keep seeing him tweeting things to her account. But again, her Twitter account is private. To sorta-kinda get around that, go into Twitter’s search feature. Type your boyfriend’s username. Then type This Bitch’s username. Click “Search.”

Since her account is private, you still cannot see anything This Bitch has tweeted, but at least you now you can see everything your boyfriend has ever tweeted at her. The tweets go all the way back to 2012.

Man, they have a long history.

Man, he’s always been fond of her.

Man, she’s… always been a bitch to him.

Step 4: Do the same thing with Instagram.

Type in the accounts of everyone that could possibly have posted a picture of her. Her friends from high school, whose names you know from conversations with your boyfriend. Her friends from college, which you have deciphered among the 50+ commenters on every single one of her gorgeous Facebook profile pictures. Fuck.

You find plenty more pictures of her.

Fuck. Just, fuck.

Step 5: Don’t forget Google and YouTube!

At this point, you’ve got nothing to lose. You type her name into Google, and you find a beautiful picture of her, perfect hair, lovely outfit, on her university’s website.

You type her name into YouTube, and you find a video of her singing at some showcase.

Fuck, she can sing too???

Take a moment to reflect.

Step 6: Make sure you’re taking care of yourself.

Let’s face it; if you’re going to these lengths to internet stalk someone, there’s probably something seriously wrong in your life that needs to be changed. You meet up with your boyfriend to talk. You are open with him about your feelings on all of this, avoiding the part about, you know, all the internet stalking.

“Look,” he says. “You’ve changed since we started dating. When we met, you were so confident and carefree, but now, you’re always depressed and you’re honestly miserable to be around. And because of that, yeah, maybe I do think about her sometimes.”

He assures you that the woman with whom you’ve found yourself in psychological competition isn’t real; that she’s a romanticized version of someone he used to know, that his version of her is not attainable by anyone, not even the real version.

This should help you. Instead, all you can think about is how not only will you never be enough to make the man you love happy, but you will never even be anywhere close to enough.

Sooner than later, you’ve broken up with him. It’s the most horrendous pain you’ve ever felt. But you know it was the right thing. For the first time in a long time, you feel like you’re on your way back to normal.

Step 7: Shift into maximum stalking overdrive.

You try to stay friends. You really do. In some respects, it works. The breakup allows you two to talk about how you truly feel about one another without the prerequisites that come from being in a relationship. He sees and adores the attractive things in you, but not so much that he’s unable to swallow the feelings he had when you two were an item. He craves your company, but not, never, the way he craves her. He loves you. But he is not in love with you.

Nevertheless, you’re starting to feel better after about a month of being broken up. You’re back on Tinder and all of your conversations are going like this:

Chad: hey

You: Hey how’s it going?

Chad: nm chillin u?

You: saaaaaame haha…

Chad: so what brings u to tinder?

You: to be honest… I’m on the rebound

Chad: oh? Lol

You: Yeah I just broke up with my boyfriend because it was painfully obvious that he was in love with his best friend from high school who is waaaaaaaaay hotter than me and smarter than me and more talented and skinnier than me. The worst part is that she isn’t even nice to him while I would do anything for him and he still wants her more than me. I guess it just goes to show, don’t be threatened by your partner’s exes, be threatened by their Ones That Got Away. You know? I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever love again at this point and I’m just in a really weird place right now and I just feel awful about myself so I guess I’ve found myself back on Tinder because I want rough, meaningless sex to take the pain away.

Chad: when r u free

Other than that, you are doing just swell. Seriously.

You both leave for winter break to your hometowns, which are a few counties away from each other. This gives you a chance to do your own thing. You spend time with your family and your cat. You see old friends. You get your wisdom teeth pulled. You sleep a lot. You get high from the painkillers your surgeon gave you and drink bone broth hoping this liquid diet helps you lose weight. You watch Requiem for a Dream alone at midnight and swallow the thought that maybe you’ve hit rock bottom.

But, hey. At least you’re not thinking about This Bitch anymore.

This changes on New Year’s Eve when he sends you a long text. He tells you that he met up with This Bitch the previous night. Suddenly, you feel like you’re going to vomit. As you read the text, you first decipher the answer to your first question: No, nothing happened. He goes into detail about their time together. He calls her smart and strong, two words you would do anything to hear him call you. He tells you that, despite all the good in her, her Ivy League education had turned her into a condescending and elitist asshole. He opens up to you about how absolutely devastated this makes him.

You try to comfort him. But now you’re finding tears leaving your eyes as if they’re being pulled out like an imaginary rope by a derisive mime.

Soon after, you realize you cannot do it. You cannot be around him without being reminded that you weren’t enough. Something drives you to ask him a question you know you shouldn’t ask him.

“Do I mean as much to you as she does?”

It’s silent for a moment.

“That’s a complicated question.”

“That’s an answer,” you say, fighting back tears.

Unfortunately, this exchange happens in his car, in the middle of the West Virginia Turnpike, as you both are riding six hours south back to campus. This. This is rock bottom.

For the next month or so, you completely lose yourself. You cry every day. You drink a lot of wine. You let a Republican from Tinder stick his dick in you. Even so, you try to tell yourself everything is going to be okay. You tell yourself to stop the Internet stalking.

Instead of listening to yourself, you take the Internet stalking to a new level.

It’s time for you to create fake accounts.

The following are my tips for creating the best fake account for stalking purposes:

Make your account private. You don’t have shit to show for your fake person because, well it’s a fake person. So don’t pretend you do.

Go to www.thispersondoesnotexist.com and refresh until you find your new profile picture.

Write a good bio for your fake person. For example, if you decide to go the teenage girl route, which I did, some good bios might be: “Minnesota born, Texas raised. Coffee addict. Philippians 4:13.” “It’s kind of a funny story. #YesAllWomen #ISupportDACA” “I like the Office and going to Target.”

Keep in mind that what your bio absolutely needs is an indicator that your fake person is an incoming freshman at the college This Bitch attends. If her account is private, it means she does not want anyone she doesn’t know snooping around on her social media. Obviously, you are not someone she knows. However, she might let you follow her if you’re someone she thinks she will know in the future.

Do not, I repeat, do NOT follow her until you have a fair amount of followers. For instance, I personally do not trust people with less than 80 Instagram followers, even if I know they’re a real person. One way to get followers quick is to follow one of those “get followers fast” accounts. However, I know of a quicker way. Put in your bio somewhere that you are a part of a specific community, and follow people within that community. They will follow you back, because people who spend their hours on Instagram talking to people in a “community” are so welcoming and desperate for companionship that they probably won’t even realize that they’ve just been followed by a fake person. Examples of communities to associate your fake person with: people with chronic illnesses (aka spoonies), the kink community, flat earthers, hardcore Selena Gomez fans.

Create your fake account. Follow her. Patiently await the notification that she has approved your follow request. When she finally does, look through her stuff. Look at her beautiful Instagram posts and her hilarious tweets.

She’s simply better than you in every conceivable way.

Cry even more. Drink some wine. Open Tinder.

Step 8: Take another look.

You spend an embarrassing amount of time over the next few months on This Bitch’s social media. But the more you look at her accounts, the more you feel like you know this girl. After all, you’ve figured out the names of every member of her family, the name of her roommate, and you could make a timeline of all the different hair colors she has sported since 2013. You even know exactly where she lives on her college campus, all the way down to her room number.

But the more you look, the more you realize that you’ve been viewing her through the eyes of your ex-boyfriend. Now that you’re a few months removed from him, you can look at her and see just another hopelessly confused human on this hopelessly confusing planet. There are probably things you know about life that she doesn’t, and there are probably things she knows about life that you don’t. On the surface, the truth is that, if nothing else, you two are equals.

This may all be true, but you cannot shake the thought: he still would have picked her over you.

You start going to counseling to work out these emotions. You’re prescribed an antidepressant. Day by day, things slowly turn up.

Step 9: Look at how far you’ve come.

After about a month, getting out of bed is no longer a challenge. You start to go days without crying. You can finally sleep at night without melatonin supplements. You realize you’ve gone a month without using any alcohol or fucking any Republicans. You write this essay as a way of coping, and it encourages you to expound upon your literary talents. All of the raw emotion you’ve garnered up from the incomparable experience of falling in love stops manifesting itself in tears and begins manifesting itself in work you are proud of.

For the first time in years, you are able to look at yourself in the mirror and appreciate what you see. All the time spent at the gym and eating better over the last year has made you physically stronger and taken some inches off of your waist. Your face, with the freckles, and the nose, and the downward-slanted teal eyes are still there, they will never leave, but they all make up the physiognomy of this person that you are now proud to be. (And, when you leave the soul-crushing context of comparison to an ethereal dream… you’re actually pretty hot.)

You’re still hurting. You know you may never completely stop hurting. But you are hopeful that one day, you will find someone who chooses you every time.

Before you know it, you realize that you no longer have the urge to look on This Bitch’s social media. Before you know it, you realize that your ex has no place in your life anymore. Before you know it, you have moved on.

Step 10: Delete your fake accounts.

You don’t need them anymore.