LAURE / Childish, narcissistic, assertive, materialistic, restless, whiny, Laure has all the flaws that men assign to women, including beauty.

    Everyday, I declare my love for her on Facebook with an average of forty signs (°)(°) and characters for each status update. In a bit more than four years, my 4,900 friends accompanied us in our trips to Corsica, Greece, Africa, the 20th district of Paris, Rolland-Garros, a dinner with the Obamas on the evening of their first investiture. My friends came on Laure's side when she got cross with the Sarkozy-Brunis, don't ask me why. I don't remember. I supported the abolition of death penalty in the world, the closing of open-cast mines in places I never heard about, I chased down dictators who existed only in my bourgeois-bohème mind, and I did all that out of love for her. I also posted lolcats on my Facebook wall to make her laugh :/ I spent sleepless with her at the Amour hotel ♥, changed a hundred times our relationship status to “married-single-it's complicated”. A hundred times she cancelled lunches we didn't plan “we're married for better worse, but not for lunch”, she dumped me a thousand times but she always took me back. She died twice, the first time around 6 AM, on acid, hit by a Porsche Cayenne on the promenade des Anglais during the Cannes festival, the second time? Probably because I was bored.

    I tell her story everyday, often several times a day. My friends on Facebook either love or hate her, but they are not indifferent to our passion. A status about Laure can generate up to fifty likes

and forty comments. Because of the virality of the social networking website and of the number of my friends, six to twelve thousand people, friends, and friends of friends, read my daily love declarations as well as all my status updates, whether passional or professional.  Not counting about a hundred private messages sent by women animated by various motives, such as concern: “Does Laure really exist?”, jealousy: “I would love you to write me love letters”, “She is so lucky”, dismay: “You seem to be suffering”, anger: “you are mistreating her!!!”,  or friendship: “dump the bitch, she's not the one you need”. We even received dinner invitations, or postcards, sent to my Agency.

My epistolary 2.0 relationship with Laure all started with a poke and a private message. The Sorrows of Young Werther, reviewed by Mark Zuckerberg. On Facebook, I am Petrarch, Laure's chaste lover. Status updates which are intended to her have created a strong emotional relationship between me and Facebbok friends. Shameless, passionate, frequent, totally devoted her, my love declarations provided my digital existence with some material. They considerably increase my visibility on the social networking website, but also in real life. Along with hatred, love is the emotion that enjoys the biggest impact on the Internet. Everyday, unknown people, women most of the time, stop me on the street to tell me I am lucky to be so in love. They ask me about her, if I'm on my way to meet her, since when do I know her, if she exists.

    My answer is that Laure is my lover. She's here, not far from me.

    You don't have to protect your personal data on Facebook, they're accessible through many other ways. It's not about protecting them as if they were a secret, a secret is always against someone, it's about protecting your intimacy.