I can't find my ex online. What's up?

Post Reply New Topic

Ive been trying to find my ex online because I'm curious what he is up to now. His old Facebook page hasn't been used in 2 years and has only 20 friends. I tried searching on Google and I haven't seen anything about him at all. No nothing. I even searched to see if he might have gotten arrested or passed away but no. Also he stopped living with his parents 2 years ago according to the electoral role. Why might this be? Do you think he quit the internet? Is using a different identity or something? I'm shocked that I've found nothing at all

Maybe your ex simply doesn't want to be stalked.

Only because I care about if people are doing well or not. I'm just looking online. Anything posted online is public knowledge so if I do find out information about him there is no problem in knowing because why would the information be available if it was meant to be a secret.

Does that make sense?

I doubt he would be hiding just from me. I hadn't spoke to him or bothered him in about 3 years. Just yesterday I went to see what's up. I was once going to quit the internet and stuff and not be found but i didn't do it. I'm not wanting to get involved in his life again or anything.

Maybe he is in the army. Or maybe he is in jail. Who knows?

He could be homeless, could be living overseas, could have changed his name. Witness protection program or got hired by the CIA & is deep undercover. Maybe he won the lottery and hired someone to clean all traces off the 'net. Or he joined a cult and is only allowed five minutes a week on the compound PC. Could have gone back to the land & is up in western Washington living off the grid. Maybe he married and changed his name. Working on an oil rig in the North Sea. The possibilities are endless, really.

It's normal to occasionally look up old flames, btw. Part of moving on & growing, thinking of where your lives went.

One person I dated is doing well, never married, got their doctorate and seems quite happy; I'm happy for them. Another went right back to the life they grew up in, married someone just like their other-gender parent and is probably moving through life in that "this is what I know" sort of way. I've never contacted either, didn't have any reason to. But I was curious and wanted to know that they are happy, or at least content.

I also have two almost-friends/coworkers from the 90's that I'd love to reconnect with but they've similarly disappeared from the face of the internet. Last I heard via old ex-coworkers, both are alive and well. They just do real world stuff and don't much care for computers anymore (bizarre for those two).

Finally, general search engines are notoriously fickle due to the way they rank & index sites. You can run a search one day & find nothing, try again in six months and find what you are looking for and then six months later again, it's gone. And the "find info on a person" sites are almost notoriously inaccurate or noisy.

So, wait a month and look again, or keep searching but use different tools?

It's not always "stalking" to want to look people up, particularly in this age of social media connecting everyone these days -- I have done so on friends and family members I've lost touch with but whom I still genuinely wonder what's happened to them, as some are now old enough that death is a possibility and I would simply want to know. I have found zero results on a surprising number of them. Except for the ones that did actually die -- I found obituaries on an alarming number of friends.

As for the people I've found no results on -- there can be completely innocent reasons for their absence from the internet. Some people of my own generation are self-admitted technophobes who profess no use for the internet and wouldn't know how to even power up a computer. Seriously. I recently caught up in real life with an old classmate whom I had previously googled and couldn't find online, and it turned out the reason why is that he doesn't even care about computers or the internet -- he's hardcore old school and barely texts never mind gets online.

Others, like your ex who at least had a Facebook account, still may be sufficiently uninterested in the net that even though they have somewhat of a presence, it doesn't occur to them to create a greater one. Some people are all over the web, with accounts on every social media. Some people dip a toe in but truly are still more involved in their real life than an online one.

There isn't necessarily any reason to believe your ex is dead or in prison just because he's not on the web. I know people alive and kicking and living ordinary lives whose names come up with zilch when you google them hoping to connect or whatever. Don't sweat it, if he had died there'd probably be an obit, so it's good news to have nothing.

And it's not shady to want to know how someone's doing as long as that's the only intention.