Satisfying your inner Rebecca Black lover, and other ways to use new Secret Pinterest Baords

If all you Pinterest enthusiasts haven’t heard…the website announced today that you can now have….drumroll please…SECRET BOARDS. Gasp.

This may seem like a trivial announcement to some, but for social media gurus like myself, it is colossal, genius and you may even go as far to call it revolutionary.  According to the website, the secret boards are “great for secret Christmas shopping!” and all that, but us twenty-somethings know better.

Here are the top three reasons that you, too, should be overly and somewhat inappropriately excited about Secret Pinterest Boards:

1. You can now plan your secret wedding without your boyfriend knowing or without fearing virtual pin-criticism because you’re single.  If you are like me, the wedding category is top priority when browsing Pinterest. And let’s be real, seating assignment chalkboards, photo-booth guest entertainment and the famous “I DO” written on the bottom of your wedding shoes didn’t just magically become trends. Pinterest has single-handedly transformed the DIY wedding. If you are UNLIKE me, you have a boyfriend.  And that boyfriend may be freaked out by the fact that you just pinned 17 photos of bridesmaid dress color combinations or your dream engagement ring that costs about the same as Jennifer Aniston’s. And all to your “Future Plans” Pinterest board. You better believe this will freak him out, it freaks me out when I see it on my homepage!  And ladies, it’s even sadder if you’re single. Solution: pin your bouquet arrangements and “50 ways to have a godly marriage” advice to your secret board, and keep that crap under wraps. 
2. There is finally a way to pin your diet tips AND unhealthy recipes at the same time without feeling pin-guilt.  The Fitness category on Pinterest is actually legitimately helpful, and this is coming from someone whose daily cardio consists of walking up my apartment stairs. I, like most twenty-somethings, frequently entertain tiny spurts of juice fasts and no-carb diets, most of which usually happen before a wedding or sorority formal and also most of which are not successful.  You can almost always detect my dieting sprees by my pins to my Recipe Board, which sometimes include protein shakes and low-carb tilapia recipes and other times includes no-bake peanut butter cookies and taco dip.  Props to Pinterest for finally allowing me to both pretend to be health-concise and pin-fully delicious cookie recipes at the same time. Secretly.
3. Your guilty pleasures can now be pinned without worry of pin-judgement and social suicide.  We all have guilty pleasures that Pinterest unknowingly fuels and gets the worst of us. Maybe you actually really think Rebecca Black is a gifted singer and a treasure to our generation.  Maybe you really just appreciate a good Drake quote.  Or maybe you have a small obsession with photos of babies in buckets. Pin those embarrassing guilty pleasures to your secret board and don’t fell an ounce of embarrassment ever again.

In conclusion, a big shout out and thanks to the people at Pinterest for understanding our generation and finally giving us a way to express ourselves…to just ourselves.  Let the secretive pinning begin!

Mark Zuckerberg: A murderer of love & how Facebook will eventually be the death of our generation

While doing my daily news sweep at work, I came across this article, which analyzed the complicated concept of dating in a social media obsessed world, and basically how Facebook ruined our lives.

Ok, not our lives, but dating, for sure.

I thought about this article at a few points over this past weekend.  My roommate and I were in the car participating in our usual senseless banter, and were discussing a fairly new relationship of one of our friends.  Wait, what level was their relationship at? “Well, she calls him her boyfriend, but they aren’t FBO, so who knows.”

(To all you newbies to my frequent abbreviations, FBO=Facebook Official)

What kind of sick world do we live in that unless you announce your relationship status to your 500 cyber world of “friends”, it doesn’t really exist?!

Now, most of my friends (and my most recent ex) know that I am a firm believer in not letting the “Facebook relationship status” debate ruin a perfectly good, undefined relationship.  But the truth is, Facebook really does affect the way young adults our age deal with their love life.

 

Here is my list of 6 common misconceptions and reasons why Facebook sucks when it comes to love, lust, and the convoluted world of one-night stands:

1. If the cute guy you met at the bar last night doesn’t have a Facebook, he therefore, does not exist.  Ok, I am guilty of this one. And actually, last weekend. News flash: Not everyone has a Facebook.  It is really going to be ok if you can’t know his birthday, most recent thoughts on the World Series and highest Farmville score.
2. If his profile picture does not include his girlfriend, their relationship is doomed.  It seems as though we all have formed this weird notion in our heads that changing your profile picture to you and your significant other is some kind of weird step forward in your relationship. It’s not. Sometimes he just thinks the picture of him funneling a Natty Light with his fraternity brother is cuter.
3. The relationship is not real unless both the couple’s Facebook profiles say that it is.  I, unlike many of my peers, do not believe that Mark Zuckerberg should have the power to dictate where my most recent love interest and me stand at that current moment in time. Also, I really don’t need my second cousin twice-removed and that girl that sat next to me in Biology two years ago to know details of my love life such as at what time and place my relationship started and a collection of weird pictures of the happy couple.  I also really could live without the dramatic “broken heart” icon that appears where your over your most recent fling and the 9 comments under it reading “Awww what happened?!”, or “You can do so much better girl!” Let me live my life without defining what it is, Mark!
4. Stalking a person’s Facebook profile before a first date is not only a great idea, it’s necessary. False.  If you have already scanned the last 18 months of his profile page, opened every one of his photo albums since his senior prom and can recognize his past three girlfriends by name and face…your relationship is probably already doomed.  Sure, it’s fine to make sure he’s normal (see reason #5), but it really is not necessary to cyber-stalk the crap out of your new love interest. Give the poor guy a chance to actually tell you who he is without you already knowing.
5. If their Facebook profile looks normal, they are normal. You can pretty much fabricate every single morsel of information on your Facebook page. If he collects toe nail clippings or has a tail, it ain’t gonna be in his Facebook info. Also, child molesters and mass murders have Facebook. Comeon, people!!!
6. The more pictures a couple posts, the happier they are. This one I recently learned through a personal experience.  And through my research, I found that usually the opposite is true.  Some couples seem to think that by posting 13 Instagram-ed photos of them from the same event in different filters and smile adjustments, they will seem happy to the rest of their imaginary Facebook friend world.  Let’s all try something.  Stop trying so hard to convey to everyone on your timeline that you’re happy, and actually be happy. If the number of ‘likes’ or “You guys are so cute together!” comments on your latest couple photo dictate how confident you are in your relationship, it’s probably time to get a new relationship.
   

Can we all just make a pact to stop letting Facebook put strict guidelines on our love lives? Think about how much stress would be lifted off our shoulders if we didn’t have to think about why he was tagged in a picture with his ex or what Grandma is going to think about your “It’s complicated” relationship status (what does that even mean, anyway??).

Whatever happened to a guy giving a girl his letterman jacket to symbolize the next step in the relationship?  I want to go back to the Grease-era and for my next beau to ask me to wear his class ring when he wants to “go steady” with me. 

Then, I want to Facebook it. 

Is that too much to ask?