Exes turn stalkers online

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They all sat around her laptop while she ranted about him and clicked away furiously. Her friends sympathetically listened, nodded and agreed that he was a cad. Fuming about one’s ex is passé, now it’s all about stalking him or her. No, not stalking him in real life but following his every move in the virtual world!
Suzanne Mathias recently broke up with Mark J., her boyfriend of two years. Now she ends up checking his Facebook page everyday to see what he does with whom. “We have a lot of common friends and I definitely want them to spend more time with me. I want to know what he’s up to though we are not dating,” she says. Ask her whether it causes friction with her friends and she shoots back, “All is fair in love and war.” Guess this is war!
So what makes young people virtual stalkers? “Social media allows people to update every aspect of their lives 24X7. Inherently, I think people are voyeuristic — you always want to know what’s going in someone else’s life,” says Gauri Sridhar, a psychology graduate.
“Once a couple has been friends for a while, they tend to have common friends and hang out at the same places. Obviously you keep running into each other. Sometimes, it also becomes a habit of keeping track of everyone who is or isn’t part of your life.”
Rajiv Srivatsa recounts this little tale about how he was stalked by an ex-girlfriend online so much so that he finally deleted his Orkut profile! “If I left a comment on my friend’s page, she would follow suit. If I added an app, she would add it. It was like someone was watching my every move,” he says. Is this perhaps what they can ‘love’?
Rajiv refutes saying, “This is stalking pure and simple. Just because the person is not physically following you doesn’t make it less stressful or irritating. It starts affecting your life and you have to think twice before doing something online.”
If you thought only guys were at the receiving end, think again. College student Namrata Ravi laments faced a similar issue with a friend-turned-foe. “Ashwin and I used to be good friends but we just fell apart over some issue. I stopped taking his calls and didn’t reply to any of his smses. He constantly sent me messages on Facebook, wrote comments on photos and even poems! I finally had to block him,” she says.
Try reasoning with her that he perhaps wanted to be friends with her again, she snaps, “That’s not the kind of friendship I want.”
It looks like ‘wooing’ a woman and ‘pursuing’ a man is fine when two people are dating. But once the relationship heads south, is the same thing called ‘stalking’?