Facebook Drama Part Deux

A while back I wrote about my friend that got and accepted a Facebook invite from her husband's mistress. After I warned her, she eventually unfriended her and went on with her life. These days on Facebook, folks are doing the "Send a question to my inbox and I'll answer it on my status" thing. Some of my other friends are posting about how stupid and dangerous it is, and others are theorizing that relationships are bound to be ending over this game. Little do they know that personally, I'm watching a whole different set of issues unfold on there.

Back in high school, my best friend (Julie) was a few years older than me, but she dated a dude that was in my grade (Derek). She and he broke up when she cheated on him. Since then, they've both moved on. She's got kids, he's got kids and they'd fallen into distant memories. On Facebook a while back, I noticed that many of my online friends were going to be attending an engagement party. I looked at the invite and discovered that it was my best friend's ex. She's not on FB, so I passed the info on to her. She told me that she was happy for him and wished him the best.

I later decided to send him an FB invite, after all, we were at one point classmates. To my surprise, he not only accepted the invite, he sent me a message asking how she was doing. I told Derek that Julie was doing well and that she lived in the same house that she'd grown up in. He asked for her number. *Pause* I guess I should have considered the fact that he was engaged, but I took that to mean that he only wanted to get a little closure over his bad breakup from his high school love before he got married. *Resume* I sent him her number and hit her and told her that I'd passed it on. She shrugged.

Derek later called Julie and he agreed to go to her home to catch up. She told me that he showed up with a condom. We know how the story goes from there. Fast forward a month and a half later and they've had sex a few more times. He's since told Julie how unhappy he is with his fiance, and when asked if he still intended to marry her, he'd say that after falling for my friend again, he still wasn't sure. She even tried to tell him to beat it, but he's taken the stance that he's not going anywhere. My girls and I have even considered that perhaps he is trying to get revenge on Julie by making her fall in love, only to harshly dump her with his impending wedding. I've warned her that it's a no win situation. I consider myself a bit of an expert on these kinds of things. She said that it was purely physical on her end, so no harm, no foul. Naturally, I was put on alert to when he may be posting things that have to do with her.

I observed that one day, one of my classmates posted the word "congratulations" on his page. I took note and wondered what it was about, but I figured it had to do with the engagement. I chuckled. A few days later, Julie and our other friend Kathy called me. Kathy asked if I'd seen the congrats notices on his page. I said that I had, but I hadn't taken much notice to it. Kathy said there had also been congrats notes that said things about his expanding family and about Derek expecting another child. Naturally, the three of us girls went into high alert. It was one thing for him and my homegirl to be fooling around, even if he was just unhappy, it was totally different if he was in reality having no desire to leave his fiance because they had an expanding family on the horizon.

I agreed to hit up my classmate to casually ask if Derek and his fiance were expecting a child. She confirmed our suspicions. Since Derek's fiance and I also had a bunch of mutual friends, I also sent her an FB invite. hoping to slide in undetected. It worked. But what I'd found then really surprised me. Apparently the fiance (who at one point had herself listed as his fiance) had herself listed as "single." She'd written something last week about women not having any respect for men in relationships. Uh oh. I texted my squad. She said that she'd have to forgive. She said that she'd have to depend on God because He would never let her down. Hmmm...

Derek kept things cool with Julie. He hadn't said anything was out of the ordinary. Julie, Kathy and I theorized the situation. Perhaps he'd told her about Julie. But if so, what were his reasonings? Did he tell her about my friend, hoping that she'd be heart broken and break up with him so he wouldn't have to man up and do it himself? Had someone told his fiance that they'd seen he and Julie at the home they shared together? I warned Julie that our hometown was really small and close knit and that his particular neighborhood turned out men that considered themselves brothers for life. The women from Derek's neighborhood were close also. That's one of the things I love and hate about the area that I'm from. Most of the people that grew up that way don't move too far away so there isn't much that goes undetected.

But then it got a bit deeper. I looked at Derek's page again and noticed that a different girl had posted something on his page, thanking him for making her pregnant. She promised to be a great wife to him and mother to his child. A short while later, the fiance posted a tagged ultrasound pic of their baby on his page. WTF?! TWO women pregnant by Derek, while he's banging out Julie at the same time? Again, I texted the ladies. Since Kathy has a page, I told her to go to his page and what to look at. I also gave her my log in info so that she could further dissect the fiance's page.

So basically, through FB, my friend linked back up with her engaged exboyfriend. Through FB we then learned that his fiance is pregnant. And through FB learned about potential another potential woman as well. And, this, my friends is why so many people avoid Facebook like the plague. I often hear it referred to as "the devil." Well, both FB and Twitter are referred to that way. I've cranked back up my Twitter usage, which is cool, but I digress.  Facebook has again reared it's ugly head and put a bunch of people's business out. So while everyone else is doing this question and answer bullshit, I'm watching some real shit unfold. All for my best friend of course. Maybe it's safe to say that nothing is wrong with FB.  Derek and the other none-careful idiots like him are the real problem.