Dear Facebook

I resisted you and then you became the next best thing to sliced bread so I jumped on board. At first it was all fun and games and then I really truly believed that you were indeed the next best thing to sliced bread when my best friend from HS who I hadn’t been in touch with for 15-ish years found me (wrote about that here).

At that time I realized that she found me on FB because I hadn’t gotten married and changed my name. Since then I’ve been reconnected with other long lost friends – who knew I’d reconnect with the folks I lived with in Israel with on Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek? Laura who I celebrated my 18th birthday with in Greece? Fellow CIT campers from Camp Swig (from, ahem, 25 years ago)? All of the people I lost touch with because back then there wasn’t an Internet or cell phones…. ( I was clearly too lazy to keep up sending letters, but I wasn’t alone in that)

But now we have this incredibly fancy Internet and you can online-chat with people from all over the world, in different time zones, and you’d never know that they weren’t just down the street from you.

While back in April I pondered that it was a good thing that I hadn’t changed from my maiden name I’m now realizing that there is much more to it than that. While I’m now try to search for VERY long lost contacts – childhood / elementary school friends – I realize that anyone I want to reconnect with if she's female my chance of finding her has decreased 80% due to the likelihood that she's now married and has changed her last name. So while they can look me up easily enough, if I were to type in ‘Jane Smith’ thousands show up, but in reality Smith may no longer be her last name any more….

Typing in just a first name is useless – my name which I always thought was unusual (couldn’t ever find personalized trinkets with my specific spelling growing up!) when I search it on FB it comes up with pages and pages of women with my name and my exact spelling. *who knew?*

I don’t want to use a reunion service to find someone that most likely also hasn’t joined (cause it's not free), but I wish that Facebook would have a maiden name field or something for all those that are no longer "Ms Smith". I don’t know who to talk to about that, or what difference my request/wish will make, so I hope that by sending my 'reconnection wish' out into the universe makes someone think about looking me up in FB, cause for right now I’m pretty easy to find.