Facebook Fury

When I got home from work after leaving Sean that morning, I was relieved to see that he had left. He also did the dishes and took my trash out (which I absolutely HATE doing, any other chore and I’m good, but for some reason taking the trash out requires me to wait until I absolutely have to take it out) upon further inspection… I saw a note he left on my dining room table:

Faith,
I’ve got to go out of town for a few days for some gigs. I know we need to talk so I’ll stop by your place when I get back.
-Sean

I sighed and kicked my shoes off while I collapsed on my couch. Trying to juggle my job along with the issues with Sean was already enough, but apparently my life wasn’t complicated enough because just then, my phone rang.

“Does your brother have an address?”

“What?” it was my mother, in absolute anger-mode, “I don’t think so, he told me he probably wouldn’t be getting one until he arrived at camp in Afghanistan.”

“Well…go look on his facebook wall.” I rolled my eyes and humored my mother.

There were the obligatory “I miss you” posts from his friends and then I saw it. Shannon, the girl he called instead of his family while he was away over Mother’s Day, and he were now “in a relationship”. My eyes started to go red, but I’ll get to that in a minute. I scrolled up and saw a comment she posted on someone’s wall post about how she could give them my brother’s new address.

“Have you found it yet?”

“Uh, yeah…”

“Did you know he had an address?”

“No…I obviously would have told you if I did. Every time I’ve talked to him I’ve asked if he’s gotten an address yet, he said ‘no’ every single time.”

My mother was distraught and after a few minutes I finally got off the phone. I feel bad for my dad…he’s going to come home to a wife jumping from being extremely livid to hysterically crying…he’ll be okay…probably.

Anyway…I’ve hated every single one of my brother’s girlfriends. Every single one. Not because I feel over protective of my brother or anything, but because I see their cards, I know exactly what they want: every girl that’s been in my brother’s life sees the “status” that he has and date him because they want the status. They don’t realize my brother is a selfish jerk who will be a horrible boyfriend to them. In high school, my brother was hugely popular with every clique you could think of. The goths? Completely friends. The cheerleaders? They idolized him, he was the school mascot and technically on the cheerleading squad, so it was a double bonus for them. The theatre kids? He was one. The band nerds? He was their hero. He was even elected Homecoming King his senior year of high school. For teenage girls in high school, obtaining popularity was THE thing to do and a lot thought they would get it by dating my brother. These girls had a lot of tactics they used for getting him to notice them…the most common being: befriend his little sister, get an invite to their house to hang out with said little sister, and then ignore her completely at said hang out date so they could flirt with her brother in the basement.

High school was not a happy time for me. I was fat, lanky, in the marching band, and all of my friends were using me to get closer to my brother, but I’ve moved on from that. I just wish other girls would move on from that too. Now, my brother is in the military... not just any branch…he’s in The Marines. And I’ll be the first to admit that the Marine Corps dress uniform is pretty goddamn sexy and the status of dating a Marine is something I also know is highly attractive to some women. It’s romantic, sending your Marine off to fight for your freedom, pining over you while he sits in the heat and dirt of a foreign country, maybe even hoping to marry you, I get it. BUT MY BROTHER IS NOT YOUR MARINE IN SHINING ARMOR. He is a jerk, he is flawed, he will treat you like crap, and I will love him and be more supportive of him than any other girl he may have in his life. The girls he has had in his life since high school are no different than the girls he dated in college, it’s just a different type of status now.

This makes me even angrier than the girls in high school. Men in the military need support and women who chase the status that dating a soldier brings aren’t tough enough to cut it. After a few weeks they realize it’s too hard to try and maintain a relationship with someone you might not be able to talk to more than once a month. I know this because I saw my mom be a military wife for more than 20 years and saw so many other military marriages end because the women just get fed up with the lifestyle.

Shannon…now she really pisses me off. First, she’s 7 years older than him. She’s in her 30’s! And from what I can tell, my brother has always known about her feelings for him but never felt the same way for her. My brother isn’t even 25 yet and he’s more immature than a 16 year old, so this relationship is going to crash and burn. She also thought befriending me and chatting me up on Skype and facebook would be a good idea (she did this before their relationship was so appropriately announced on facebook), and to be honest, I liked her. She knows my brother is an asshat and she knows he can be incredibly cruel but she was also his best friend. I knew my brother didn’t want to date her (I might be in my 20’s but that doesn’t mean I’m too old to eavesdrop on a telephone conversation) so I didn’t see her as a threat even though them dating was always something I was suspicious about.

I just didn’t think a 30-year-old woman would try the same tactics that so many other teenage girls tried before.

If I’m being honest, I’m also really hurt that my brother gave his girlfriend of two weeks his address but hasn’t mentioned anything to his family even though I’ve asked him for it several times. I would contact Shannon for it but I don’t want to. If he doesn’t want mail from his family, then it’s not worth my time bothering to send it. Maybe when this girlfriend leaves him he’ll be willing to send me his address. I’m going to take the video game I bought for him back to the store tomorrow after work and eat the cookies right now.