Dating Facebook, TMI, or Anatomy of a Spreadsheet

Important prefatory facts about me:
This is not so much a confession as a blatant and shameless personal fact: I am an internet stalker. I probably know what you have done in the past 24 hours if you are on Facebook. Your status says you’re tired? Yeah, I know; no need to tell me when I run into you in person. Crazy party you went to this weekend? Saw the pictures. However, despite my general lack of information gathering self-control, in the dating realm, I try to avoid pre-knowledge of a person. Mostly because I am a terrible liar and cannot feign surprise when you tell me about your recent vacation which is represented in photo form on Facebook. Sure, I dabble in the occasional cursory “google” search in the midst of a crush, but limit my voyeurism to generalizing on the search results: work, play, college. I make it a point to NOT Facebook friend anybody who is not genuinely in my life.

Dating Meets the Internet (No, not internet dating):
Now, take this all into consideration when I tell my little story. I had been “dating” a guy for about seven months. He friended me BEFORE the first date. This is generally against my principles, but he knew that I was active on Facebook, and I felt the implications of not accepting the friend request would be my implicit rejection of him, and I did not want to screw up the dating potential so early in the game. That said, I tried to exercise restrain, with moderate success, tried to not look at his tagged photos, his 80 photo albums and compare his ex-girlfriend (gorgeous, skinny) to myself.

As our dating involvement progressed, we actually had “The Talk” to define what we were after a couple months. This was predicated by my finding blatantly suspicious actions on Facebook by another girl. I confronted him, just to maintain face. While most couples become a legitimate couple after The Talk, we were the exception. We would continue to hook up, but were free to see other people. Enter my disintegrating lack of self control and over-analysis of his Facebook activity. Girls in pictures?? What? Is he dating her too? Torturous, the incomplete knowledge that FB brings. But, for the most part, this situation worked.

The BIG Problem (TMI):
Until. He sent me a Google document invite. To view his training schedule, in Excel format. Did I mention he is a pretty serious triathlete? This would be sort of obnoxious if it just included his workouts (sidenote: Guys, it is NEVER attractive to talk about your workouts or diets. We do not care.) But, the spreadsheet is in fact a living documentation of every facet of his life.
Columns range from the boring/innocuous to the socially detail:

• Day
• Workout
• Time
• Distance
• blah blah blah workout
• Sleep Hours
• Quality Sleep Hours [!!]
• Notes [Here’s where it gets interesting]
• Beer [He does not like fun]

I summarily disregarded the columns covering running, biking, and swimming, and directed my attention fully to ridicule the “Sleep Hours” and adjoining “Quality Sleep Hours column as well as the “Beer” column. While I can attest to the fact that details were sometimes sporadic in his recording, the “Notes” column quickly became the source of the most stalking trouble. For example: Let’s take a look at January. Oh! There I am: “Hung out w/Joanna, little late, great dinner though.” Just dinner, Runnerman? Was that the only memorable part of our evening? Scroll down a bit to the next week, “Stayed up w/Kristin watching Beetles movie. Slept til noon.” His Facebook “friend” Kristin was the stimulus for my engaging in our initial talk. Yes, I did cross reference with his Facebook page’s history. Same night, same date I had forced him to admit to during our talk.

The stalker in me had been awakened, in full force. Given our arrangement, withholding these life details would have been preferable and more appropriate. While I was at first amused, my possession of this live document ultimately became torturous. Granted, it did prove that my life was more fun than his (is “power hour” really that notable an occasion in your life to document?), but I began to be suspicious of every excursion he documented, and suspect those he omitted. Enter insecurity. And jealousy. Why was I only mentioned once in the spreadsheet in the past 3 months? Why did he not document his alcohol consumption on my birthday, or even his attendance of my party, while he felt it of worthy note to enter an entire row devoted to dancing at a techno club? My friends, in turn, were immediately incensed, and my feelings gradually escalated to that level. While I don’t think he was consciously disrespectful, his obliviousness visually displayed his ambiguous feelings toward me. With Excel as his platform, he had placed me in equal (or lesser) standing with other women in his life. Clearly, the in-between state would not work for Runnerman and myself. Clearly, we broke up shortly after.

Also, I cannot retain my self respect while dating a man who likes techno music.