Should You Friend Your Husband’s Ex-Wife on Facebook?

In 2004, Facebook started out as a cutting edge social network service for college kids. It has evolved into a resourceful and enjoyable fraternity for people of all ages.

Aside from the group of people who missed out on the computing skills revolution, and are now intimidated by all things technological, anyone with the slightest bit of digital initiative, and time, can be found on Facebook. This includes my 96-year-old mother-in-law.

To think that not even a decade ago, family members would travel across the globe to uncover distant relatives in the old country to feel deeply rooted in ancestry, and now the lineage is just a click away on Facebook.

Many parents are conflicted with the Facebook age-appropriate induction level for their children. Just like that first cell phone, giving children permission to connect to friends is somewhat daunting, especially when it involves the internet.

As long as kids friend only people they know, and keep the security settings relatively private, the chance for ill-intended stalkers is greatly reduced.  However, many teenagers seem to have upwards of 1,000 friends. That’s about the size of their high school in Chatham. They couldn’t possibly know every friend.

Ill-intended stalkers are just one of the scary factors prohibiting parents from fully embracing Facebook. The undeveloped brain factor has a lot to do with parents’ reservations. That element of peer pressure, and the need to be cool, enables kids to post stuff that is typically uncharacteristic of the little darlings.

The good news is, by the time these kids are looking for their first real job, and the potential employer is researching the candidates’ Facebook legacy, the recruiter has probably hired a reputation manager to erase his own past on the internet. Been there. Done that.

When I first started accumulating friends on Facebook, I felt like I had to update my CV with each new friend request representing a different era of my life. Now that I’m a veteran, with 67 friends, I have learned that there is no need to personally welcome each new friend to your life. It’s an unspoken understanding, that from here on out, we’ll just move forward.

The past is irrelevant on Facebook, it’s only the present that matters now. With such a refreshing thought in mind, and the six degrees of separation ever so apparent on Facebook, why not friend your husband’s ex-wife?