The Internet and online profiles on social networking sites are tools for closet stalkers to indulge in their stalker behavior. For the most part without being found out. Duh. You know this. You may even do this.

I know I do. I stalk. I Facebook stalk people. I Google search guys sometimes, especially if I get a gut feeling of dread and can’t rationalize it away. There’s nothing like the mixed emotional outburst one experiences after having gone on a date with a seemingly “normal guy” where everything goes smoothly except for that nagging feeling in the bottom of your tummy that won’t let you be totally comfortable so when you get home you Google search him and after an hour of digging you find his mug shot from a night not too long before your date where he was arrested and held in jail because of his crazy angry drunken behavior where he went on a violent rampage at a local bar throwing chairs through the glass windows and physically fighting the cops- ALL 4 of them!- when they tried to detain him, therefore justifying your tummy feeling.

For me its a combination of the glee that “AHA! MY INSTINCTS ARE RIGHT ON!” and the utter disappointment at having once again, chosen a real non-winner I can’t take home to mom.

Anyways, I’ve been enjoying the animosity of the dating website I belong to since there is no way to search for me via my real name or my real e-mail address. When I message guys I use a semi-fake first name and use it up until the 3rd date even! I am as vague as I can be when asked about where I live and work. I’m vague about where I exercise and when I workout etc… I know, it must sound a bit neurotic and or a bit wench-like to be so secretive but I like my privacy and I do have a tendency to attract the crazies.

In the past week I have been startled to the point of wanting to delete my Facebook, twice.

The first incident involves a guy from a dating website, whom I will refer to simply as “dating website guy number 1″ or “DWG#1″ because I really don’t even want to give him a name. He had contacted me, oh, about two months ago. We exchanged pleasant messages (i.e., nothing more than a few lines about the weather and weekend “excitement”) back and forth about 4 times over 2 weeks and I just wasn’t feelin’ it after my 4th message back to him. If you must know, it was because 1) I wasn’t physically attracted to him at all 2) His messages were totally boring 3) I got busy and honestly wouldn’t have had any time to meet him anyways.

So when he sent me a 5th message inquiring about possibly meeting up, I simply ignored it. THIS IS COMMON PROTOCOL on dating websites, I feel. There is no need or obligation to explain WHY you aren’t interested. NOT WRITING BACK IS THE EQUIVALENT TO NOT CALLING AGAIN after the first few dates. I didn’t hear from DGW#1 and forgot about him until a few weeks later he sent me another message asking “So when do you want to meet?”

I again ignored it and wondered “Uh, why didn’t he get the hint?”. Forgot about him again… until last week when I logged into Facebook and found a friend request waiting for me.

After the initial confusion because I had no clue as to who it was and couldn’t figure out why someone I didn’t know was friend requesting me saying “I thought that was you! Your profile picture gave it away!” I let the request sit for a bit and contacted our MUTUAL friend asking her how I might know him. This mutual friend by the way, is a girl I’ve come face to face with maybe 5 times in my life because of sports. I’ve never hung out with her in a social setting outside of athletic events where there were never any other people around except our teammates and officials.

While waiting for her response I searched through his profile and VOILA! Found the ONE profile picture he also uses on his dating website and immediately recognized him. One little slip on my privacy is that I had my same profile picture on my Facebook as I do on my dating website. Oops. When I had randomly posted something on her status update, after he had, he easily recognized me. If I had used a different profile pic in either online profile, he probably would’ve never noticed me.

Ok. NOT so random and weird, but I do feel a bit uncomfortable that he assumed we could be Facebook friends. I know, I know, for some of you this isn’t a big deal, and usually it’s not for me either. I work the privacy settings like nobody’s business and have about 12 different lists of people who can all see various forms of my profile depending on what I want to share with who (my colleagues don’t need to be seeing pictures of me in a bikini on the beach), etc…etc… but…I was put off because he had already displayed that he has the potential to be over persistent by messaging me after I had blatantly ignored him. I also felt incredibly uncomfortable that he suddenly had my full name. So I blocked him. I blocked him on Facebook and on the dating website.

But he still has my full name and I know what I can find online on people when I have their full name…ugh.

Paranoia? Perhaps, but there’s also the fact that after looking through his profile it appears that he is one of those Asian fetish guys, which I totally, TOTALLY stay away from for reasons that is worthy of a different blog posting.

Ok. So the second guy, also from a dating website, whom I will refer to simply as “dating website guy number 2″ or DWG#2 is a little bit more…stalkerish, maybe…

I received a message from him on a dating a website that started with:

“Hey there!

Last week I received an email from Brightroom about ordering pictures from that race. In fact, I think you may be in a couple of them. If so, too crazy!”

Huh…as I read through the rest of his articulate, polite, intelligent message I thought to myself, “How crazy is it that he found me?! That’s kind of cool!”

…and then I started to really think about it…

The thing about NYRR (New York Road Runner) races is that the race results are public. You can go to their website and look up a person if you know their first and last name, or their bib number. A bib is the race number assigned to you when you register for a race that you pin to your shirt so race officials know you’re legit. It’s also how the photo company, Brightroom, is able to send you your personal pictures they capture of you during the race. Your bib number is in the pic and they send you pics to the e-mail you used to register with. Once you look a person up you can see their age. You can see a full history of the races they’ve run with NYRR including their speed and even the region they are from. You can also find people in reverse if you know their age and have the time to scan all the names in that bracket. There are no pictures attached to the NYRR, thank GOODNESS.

I admit, I’ve done this. There are plenty of guys on the dating website who have pictures of themselves obviously running a NYRR race with their bib number clearly shown. So yeah, I’ve figured out the race (it sometimes says it on the bib and if not it says it at the finish line picture or somewhere in the background) and looked up their names to see how fast/slow they are and in turn Google searched and Facebooked their names…yeah. YES I’VE DONE THAT AND WILL CONTINUE TO DO THAT if and when I’m ever bored.

To be honest though, I’ve only done it with the guys I’m NOT really interested in, or if I think they might have an Asian fetish. Yes, FOR REAL. And usually I’m not interested because in one way or another they’ve insinuated that they obviously KNOW that they are faster and better at running than I am (which has yet to be the case-which I know from looking at their race history. I am soooooo not attracted to arrogance) or that they are only interested in me because of my ethnicity- which is sometimes discovered on Facebook profiles where their friends are 75% Asian females (and he himself is not Asian), they display Chinese character tattoos, etc…

When I’m interested, I like to find things out through old fashion face to face conversation.

ANYWAYS, after thinking about it and putting myself on his side I broke it down like this.

His interest was piqued after the race because yeah, we had exchanged words of encouragement in the last 2 miles (he started it with “Hey, lookin’ fast! Let’s finish strong!”). We had high-fived each other after we crossed the finish line within seconds (he beat me) and then I probably instantly disappeared, swept up in the crowd, because I don’t recall saying good-bye or introducing myself. He got the Brightroom photography pictures in an e-mail and just like mine they show me next to him in several pictures because we were stride for stride. He thought, “huh, she is as cute as I thought she was. Hmmm…I wonder what her stats are” and then logged onto NYRR, typed in my bib number, and saw my full name and my age. He then did the obvious and found me on Facebook to see if he could check out more information, but alas found that he could only see my name and 1 profile picture. So, then possibly realizing how obvious it would be that he was looking for me if he messaged me on Facebook, he went to all his other social networking profiles and after not finding me anywhere else, he settled on the small chance we were on the same dating website. It would be a bit time consuming but a sort of easy exercise.

Thanks to how super specific one can get in their search for a partner, all he had to do was type in my age, my hair color, eye color, approximate height, weight, and interests (running duh) and THERE I AM, among 30 other women AND since I’m an idiot with the same profile picture for both, ridiculously easy to recognize.

The polls are split among my friends on whether this is creepy stalkerish or flattering.

I’ve never contacted someone I’ve Internet stalked, because like I said I usually stalk the ones I’m not interested in. In two recent cases where I DID like the guy I researched I DID NOT contact either because I UNDERSTAND HOW AWKWARD AND WEIRD THAT MIGHT BE if I all of a sudden contacted them through a means that clearly indicates I discovered information about them that they didn’t give me. Maybe they were missed chances, I’ll never know.

To be clear, I am not physically attracted to DWG#2, and he is NOT my type according to what he posted on his profile, but I CAN SEE how we could possibly be friends- which is different from DWG#1 where I couldn’t even picture having a face to face conversation with him.

Ugh. UGH.
I have since changed my Facebook profile so that outsiders can’t see my profile picture.

In the end I am left wondering if I am better off not knowing someone has Internet stalked me and left to think that serendipity brought us together, or it is better to know how much effort someone put into creating a serendipitous occurrence?