Becca (name changed for privacy reasons) approached us with a dramatic revelation: her girlfriend, who she has been dating for nine months ever since their hands brushed trying to take the last pierogi in Chuckett, is a regular and ardent user on the Smith Confessional. Everything had been going swimmingly until one fateful day: the two were enjoying a romantic evening in a private room at Neilson when Becca looked over to see her girlfriend typing frantically onto the iconic pallid green website.
“It’s not just that she posts on Confesh,” said Becca. “I mean, everyone has felt the bizarre and inexplicable need to tell the panel of anonymous Smith students that they liked the stir fry or that they want to fuck a professor.” But Becca’s main concern, she told me, was not that her girlfriend was posting but what she was posting.
“She’s on there all the time,” Becca told me. “What—what could she possibly have to announce on there that often? Is she asking questions that are easily found on the website, because I think I could get past that too. But if she’s unrelentingly posting about the kinds of shits she’s taking instead of talking to a doctor or keeping that shit” —(No pun intended)— “to herself? Is she posting that she wants people on the quad to stop yelling, apparently not realizing that none of them are checking Confesh while they’re partying and that if she went outside and asked them, they’d probably stop? Is she commenting things on posts from first years about how they’re lonely and anxious that are so unbelievably mean that reading them makes one think ‘holy shit how can I share a campus with someone who thinks it’s fine to say that stuff online?’ It’s keeping me up at night.” Indeed, Becca reports feeling strained in her relationship. Every time she sees her girlfriend pick up her phone, she now wonders whether she’s contributing to the website where human decency goes to die.
Harrowing stuff. Perhaps the next Confesh post Becca’s girlfriend makes will be polling an anonymous group of peers who don’t know her situation nor have her best interests at heart on if she should come clean to her girlfriend about her activity on the Confesh.
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