It bugs me when people bitch about Facebook. Specifically, when they bitch about how boring it can be, or how full of ads it is, or how their privacy has been breached by it yet again. Because first of all, Facebook is free, and since you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You are the product, and anyone who’s been using the Internet seriously at any point in the last ten years can tell you that.

Second, it’s boring because everyone you know is boring. You’re boring. We’re all boring. Unless you’re friends with the kind of people who have trainwreck life events every few weeks (and I’m friends with a few of these people solely because of this), you should accept the fact that we all lead pretty boring lives.

Third, you know you can just log off, right? You can stop visiting multiple times a day, every day, because I assure you, Facebook isn’t making you use it. Cripes.

Facebook isn’t perfect – its iPhone app is atrocious – but it is actually good for a lot of things. Because of it, I didn’t have to go to my 10-year high school reunion to know what my former classmates we up to (or that I don’t hang out with some of them for valid reasons). But I did know that it was at a bar, and that a heartening number of people who went got way fatter than me.

Facebook is also very handy for keeping up with the people I like. When I lived away from St. Louis the first time around, there was no Facebook. There wasn’t even MySpace. Friendster existed but nobody I knew was on it, so the only way to talk to people from home was to call them on a home phone and we all know how much we hate that kind of thing. Now that I’m 3,000 miles away again, I can keep up with people without having to immediately reply to text messages.

My favorite thing about Facebook is that it allows me to hide certain people from my timeline, people who, experience has taught me, don’t get the hint when you defriend them the first one, two, or three times, as they will continue to send you friend requests even though you’re sick to fucking death of reading their lunatic status updates. People don’t know when certain (or all) of their statuses are blocked, and for the people who aren’t so bad other than their misuse of Facebook, I find the hiding option to be preferable.

Lately, the hiding I’ve been doing is of women who are too dependent on the men in their lives, to the extent that their statuses are always one of two extremes. Either they’re so totally in love and this man has made everything in their life better and turned it all around, or they’re so totally out of love because all men are awful and this one in particular is the worst. Both statuses cycle every few months to a year, which tells me that these women keep having the same experiences and making the same mistakes by choosing the same choices over and over again.

And that’s just fucking stupid.

First of all, please don’t ever let another person be responsible for your happiness. It’s not possible for one, and when you get into the mindset that it is, that if that person were gone, literally nothing else in your life would bring you happiness or have meaning, then you’ve become a poorly-functioning collection of parts. And since you’re not functioning well to begin with, you haven’t yet noticed that this is a pattern for you. Meet someone new, fall madly in love in like three fucking weeks, have a whirlwind romance in which you depend on this person emotionally and financially, and then, when the relationship runs its normal course – that is, the course determined by the endorphins in our brains as well as someone realizing that you’re a needy nutjob – you’re devastated. Until the next time, because like I said before, cycle.

Second, I wish there was a Relationship Facebook like there’s a Drunk Google. When you begin typing that 40^th status about how your significant other has let you down, you’d be automatically logged off and referred to counseling. Not for your relationship, though. For you, as you are obviously a slow learner. One of the definitions of crazy is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result every time, so please tell me how you continuing to fuck up with the same person again and again and expecting it to magically work out makes any sense? And why are you telling us about it? Any sympathy you hoped to receive went out the window the fourth time around. If you refuse to learn, then I refuse to feel sorry for you.

And to both of these types, if you take none of my other advice to heart, please please please stop posting angry statuses directed at previous or new significant others of your current or previous significant other. You’re not winning any contests here. Personally, nothing would give me more pleasure than knowing that some woman was spending energy on worrying about how I’ve affected someone who is supposed to adore her. But I’m mean. Or just a little too sane for Facebook, apparently, but that doesn’t stop me from screengrabbing the best comments and saving them to post here once I finally unfriend you.

You women are old enough to know better. Fucking figure it out already, and quit being those people on the Internet.