Noelle McCarthy: Don't be happy - be seen to be happy

Dear Noelle

My boyfriend and I broke up a couple of months ago. The parting was fairly amicable, and I'm doing OK, apart from one thing. I can't stop peeping at him on Twitter.

He tweets regularly and I find myself on there five or six times a day, checking on what he's up to.

I haven't seen him out much, or heard from him really since we broke up, which is a good and a bad thing, I suppose.

I don't want to have to deal with the awkwardness, but I really miss him. This way, he's still a part of my life.

I know it's lame though, I feel like I'm spying on him and I want to stop.

Can you help me? What should I do?

Yours sincerely

Peeping Joan.

Hi Joan,

Remember that movie with Nicole Kidman as the ambition-crazed weathergirl? To Die For, it was called.

It's years since I've seen it, but there's a line in there that's stayed with me.

"What's the point of being happy," she says at one point, in her mad, little-girl voice, "unless people can see that you're happy?"

I think about that line sometimes, when I'm updating my Facebook status for the second or third time in one day, telling my 600-odd friends what I'm wearing, or eating or reading, or thinking. I stop to wonder who exactly needs that information, and what it is I hope they're going to do with it.

And then I click "post" and sit back while it swims into the newsfeed and into everybody's consciousness forever. Well, for all of 10 seconds really, before another one appears to take the place of mine and the dance goes on.

The advent of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook has changed our lives. It's changed my life anyway, and it's certainly having an effect on yours, Peeper.

They offer us so many good things - we can stay in touch with our friends, reconnect with those people we lost, not to mention post absurdly flattering pictures of ourselves up there for the purposes of ego inflation and online flirtation.

And then there are the opportunities for information gathering, what you call spying. Don't be too hard on yourself for doing that, my peeping friend; knowledge is power, in this, as in every scenario, and what you're doing is perfectly natural and understandable.

I can tell you unequivocally I know very few women who don't use Facebook and Twitter to check a guy's credentials and keep up with what he's doing. It's stupid not to, when it's all right there for the taking, isn't it?

But for all of the great things about facebooking and tweeting, there is a downside that outweighs them all. The single worst consequence of social networking is that it's rendered us incapable of doing anything without an audience.

Everything we do, or say, or think, or wear these days gets tweeted or posted. Whether you're writing a book, or raising a family, visiting Berlin, having a boiled egg or kinky sex, it's not enough just to do that anymore, you have to let everybody know you're doing it too.

Your ex is tweeting, Peeper. That's not the same as talking, and he isn't talking to you. He used to talk to you, he used to share everything with you, back when you were having a relationship, but things have changed and you aren't together anymore. It might feel as though he's communicating with you, via these tweets, but the truth is, he isn't.

He's just trying to feel important, and connected, and worthwhile, and busy, like the rest of us.

If he wanted to communicate with you, he could phone you, or at the very least send you a text.

It doesn't sound as though he's doing any of these things. Wean yourself off him, it's time to move on.

And what better way, than to use the technology at your fingertips to do that? There are myriad open profiles out there, millions of potentially flirty tweets.

Find someone new to spy on. Facebook and Twitter are tools at our disposal, it should be us driving them, not the other way round.

Get online flirting with someone new and show social networking who's boss, once and for all. Oh, and block him from your feed ... that'll drive him wild.

Happy tweeting.

Noelle