Hey guys! Remember me? Well I decided to send an email to my ex-wife and trying to get her to understand WHY I felt like I did. Of course, this is on my blog but I'm going to reproduce the post here:

In my last post I detailed why I wasn’t going to add my ex-wife to my Facebook profile. This is what happened:

I went to my son’s holiday concert (and when I say “concernt” I mean K-2 students shouting loudly in near unison) and was asked after the friend request. I told her, in all honesty, I just don’t want her as a Facebook friend. Here is her exact response:

“Well that just tells me you have something to hide.”

Being the person that I am, I wanted to give her a little more of a reason than “I’m not your friend”, so I typed up this email and sent it to a few people for comments:

So… I felt like I should give you a little bit more of a response than “I don’t want to be Facebook friends with you”, and here it is:

I don’t want to be Facebook friends with you because you friend-requested [girlfriend]‘s older sister (who confided in us that you two weren’t exactly close in high school) in order to spy on [girlfriend]‘s profile. I know this because you mentioned that she had pictures of [my sons] from our ([girlfriend] and I) vacation and then commented again when her feed went dark. In truth I told her ([girlfriend]) that you were stalking her profile and showed her how to set her security settings so that you couldn’t see anything unless you were her friend.

I also told her older sister what was up, presented the same evidence and she has, to my knowledge, removed you.

Then, at the concert, you tell me that because I don’t want to be Facebook friends with you that it tells you that I have something to hide.

What it says to me is that I don’t want to be friends with you because we have no common friends.

What it says to me is that I don’t want to be friends with you because we share no common interests.

What it says to me is that I take a dim view of someone that says they want to “get to know” someone and instead of just coming out and trying to start a conversation they resort to what appears to be sneaky and under-handed tactics.

Tell me, did you put [mutual friend[ up to sending me a friend request for the same reason? She's not on my list anymore either because I don't want us to have any mutual friends. My social networking profile will remain un-viewable to you because you have no reason to be on it. We have no friends, no causes, no interests in common except for the boys. If you suspect some sort of wrong-doing on my part well.. you're not going to find it on my feed. In fact you're not going to find it at all.

If this isn't the case then please tell me what it is. Please tell me how you knew the second [girlfriend]‘s profile became private and why it’s not a bad thing that you chose to do things the way you did rather than trying to strike up a conversation with her. Tell me why you thought it was OK to be roundabout (dare I say sneaky?) instead of up front. I’m not mad, I genuinely want to know why you think that was OK because I don’t think it’s OK. Not in the least. It made [girlfriend] incredibly uncomfortable and it made me angry.

I don’t have anything to hide from you; I just don’t have anything to show you either.

I’m sorry if this comes off as rough; please take it with a grain of salt and realize that I’m not mad. I’m just trying to explain where I’m coming from, how I feel and what I understand the situation to be.

After a little bit of perspective and discussion, I came to the conclusion that this wasn’t the best way to go about pointing out that I knew about her ham-handed attempts to spy on my personal life and even more blatant attempts to insert herself into it. I was advised to take a more diplomatic approach and instead of accusing her of everything that I knew she had done, instead let her know just how I felt about what she had done.

I give you, then, the letter I actually sent:

So… I felt like I should give you a little bit more of a response than “I don’t want to be Facebook friends with you”, and here it is. I would have said something at the time but I didn’t think an in-depth discussion about my privacy and how you factor into it was appropriate for a Christmas concert.

It was more than a little disturbing when you told me that you had used a roundabout way to gather information on my girlfriend; you told me that you friend requested her older sister and then looked through her profile, commenting that [girlfriend] had pictures of [my sons] from our vacation (she had the only camera). Then you complained to me when her profile went dark, saying that we thought that we had open communication and that was what I wanted.

Open and easy communication is what I want, but spying on [girlfriend] through a mutual friend isn’t “open” to me; it’s actually a little sneaky and that is why I don’t feel like opening my social network to you. I’ve been spied on before and it’s doesn’t make me feel very comfortable at all and it doesn’t make me want to share anything with the person that was doing the spying.

I’ve come up with a compromise, though. There’s a site called BothParents that I think would work for us. It’s a site that gives us access to a shared calendar (so we can document events, games, etc) and gives us one email address to give to schools, daycare, sporting events, etc. That email will route to both of us so we don’t have to make sure that both of our email addresses are on whenever they sign up for an activity.

If you’re interested I can set up the BothParents account and send you the invite for the Picasa album. Let me know what you think.

Maybe sometime in the future we can be Facebook friends but not right now; I understand that you want to know (given my history I can even understand why you went about it the way you did) but that wasn’t the way to go about it and I think it closed the door for now.

I’ll let you know how she responds.

I've gotten a response and I'm digesting it currently. I know it can be somewhat bad form to air your dirty laundry in public but I don't claim to know everything and the perspective, positive or negative, is always welcome.

TL;DR: In 1386, a pig in France was executed by public hanging for the murder of a child. It was given full legal representation and provided human clothing for trial.