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Dear Doctor Love,
My boyfriend has over a thousand female friends on his Facebook page. The guys he has on his friends list are mostly people he knows but he doesn’t even know most of the girls, he just accepts any friend request he gets.
I am not normally jealous but sometimes I get a little upset when some girl posts photos on his page of her wearing a bra or jiggling her behind and he responds. I know these girls just want attention and I am confident in my appearance, but I don’t like it when they put their sexy photos on his page. Some of them are pretty nasty and they share a lot of photos.
I don’t think he is cheating but at the same time I would like him to delete some of these girls, especially because they are not personal friends.
Is it okay to ask him to get rid of some of them and stop accepting friend requests from so many girls?
/s/Questioning in San Pedro
Dear Questioning,
It’s hard to be at your confident best one hundred percent of the time, and it’s not unnatural to get a little fed up with the constant barrage of attention seekers on social media. It’s good that you are aware that the girls who are posting these pictures are doing simply that—attention seeking. The “Like” they get from a sexy photo boosts their confidence but understand, it’s not aimed at him—they want to be admired by the masses.
Little girls grow up to be women. Little boys grow up to be big boys. They take pleasure in things that women think are utterly foolish. Consider the fart jokes that have thrived for centuries amid the raucous laughter of guys urging unsuspecting people to “pull my finger.” Guys are just little boys in size eleven Nikes so when girls act outrageously, it’s nothing more than a laugh for your boyfriend, even though you find it annoying.
Could he be more selective in his choice of friends? Probably—but only because it bothers you to a degree. In a serious relationship, the feelings of the partner should always come first. That doesn’t mean that one partner controls the other, but if people are sharing personal information or photos that cause unease, it’s okay to ask him to delete both the offending material and the poster.
It won’t mean that he’ll never see these types of shares, his remaining friends will post them, but it will cut down on the number of girls who post sexy photos directly to his page.
