(Image by Wikipedia)
Not convinced?
Here are six ways that your online personas can ruin your love life.
Online, as in life, you will be judged by the company you keep and how you interact with those people. Have you got some wild friends who have tagged you into equally wild photos? Or maybe you have an attention-seeking friend who loves to post inflammatory status updates?
Depending on privacy settings, potential dates will be able to see your friends, their photos, their status updates, and more tellingly your comments. And like it or loathe it, you will be judged on this.
There is no right way to do this, so the safest option is to not ever update your relationship status, ever! There are however, lots of wrong ways to do it. Update your status from single to in a relationship too early and you could scare your new love away. Fail to update it quickly enough and you might cause offence. And Facebook recognises a relationship is a two-way thing, so your new partner will need to accept this new status online if you want to tag them in to the update.
If that’s a step too far in a fledgling relationship you will be placing them in a really awkward position. Or perhaps they hardly ever use Facebook. That means you don’t need to worry about most of the things on this list, but it also means that your relationship status will be shown as ‘pending’ for all eternity, which is just a little bit embarrassing.
Along the left side of your Facebook profile page is a list of the pages you have liked. Take a look at that list and see what it says about you. If you’ve taken the liberty of liking every free dating site you’ve ever come across, or perhaps you follow mother and baby pages, or some very niche television programs, you may want to consider scrubbing these from the list at least in the short term.
You might think that contacting your new love on Facebook or Twitter counts as staying in touch, but they might not. Interactions via social media are only worthwhile if both parties perceive them as valuable. If you are both social media fans and view a message on a wall as the equivalent of a text, then go ahead and communicate via the network.
If you have public Pinterest boards be very careful what you are pinning there. Your ‘My Dream Wedding board’ may have been created years ago, but it will be a damn scary site for a new date.
If you have Pinterest linked to your Facebook or Twitter, double-check privacy settings so your new pins don’t show up as a status update.
It isn’t just what you reveal about yourself that can damage a relationship. A little social media stalking will uncover a lot of information about your new love, some of which you might prefer to stay clueless about.
For many people social media is an important part of their life, and simply deactivating accounts in order to protect a blossoming relationship is not an option.
Instead, conduct a thorough audit of your online profiles and what they say about you, and make maximum use of privacy settings to ensure you are revealing the bare minimum about yourself.