The second milestone occurred Sunday: I accepted my mom’s Facebook friend request.

It’s been sitting idly on my requests page for months now, as I have been reluctant either to accept or reject it. Today I finally caved.

Some of you may be fervently shaking your heads now, appalled that I would ever allow a parent into my online world, but most are probably wondering what the big deal is. The significance is two-fold.

First, my mom is by training both a lawyer and a journalist, which combined have endowed her with a superhuman ability to extract information from even the most reluctant of sources and sketchiest of details. I figured that if I wanted to maintain some modicum of privacy, I should not provide her with unrestricted access to a constant stream of electronic updates about my daily activities.

Which brings me to my second point: I do not really want anyone following each of those updates and activities. That sounds counterintuitive—to post something on to the World Wide Web means nothing if not to place it in the public sphere—but upon further reflection, I think most of you will probably admit to the same paradoxical desire.

Now let me clarify. I have no expectation of privacy when I post something on Facebook, and each individual post is meant to be read. Collectively, however, they paint a more complete and personal portrait of my life, and anyone who followed each and every update would be considered a stalker, albeit of the anonymous, and more innocuous, Facebook variety.

Still, I feel comfortable on Facebook because I feel confident that no one really cares enough to follow every single detail of my online life. Even if I’m wrong, no one would comment on every post or ask questions about people they do not know and remarks they do not understand. No one, that is, except my mother.

Our parents’ generation is not native to social networking and therefore cannot grasp this fundamental principle of online etiquette: Even though something may be posted where the entire world can see it, it is not always socially acceptable to read it.

Facebook users of our age would be horrified to broadcast exactly whose pictures they have viewed or to let slip into offline conversation a tidbit gleaned accidentally from their News Feed. The grown-ups, on the other hand, fail to understand this peculiar yet wholly widespread Millennial phenomenon.

And yet, I accepted the request. I decided that if my little brother can become an adult, my adult parents could learn to use Facebook like their children. After all, my brother has a Facebook page too now (yup, Facebook has in fact spread to middle school), monitored by my mother’s News Feed, and while it is cluttered with countless annoying quizzes, there are no parental comments. More importantly, I also decided that I could grow up enough to accept the occasional intrusions and motherly questions.

So Mom, I will accept your online friendship…on a trial basis, to be made permanent only after a period of good Facebook behavior. If it doesn’t work out, it’s OK—I promise not to unfriend you offline.

Eve is a junior in Arts & Sciences. She can be reached via e-mail at elsambor@wustl.edu.

I forget when exactly my boyfriend told me that his parents were visiting, but I do remember that we had only been dating for about a month, and although I responded enthusiastically, I was practically lacing up my running shoes (Julia Roberts-style). I prayed that his next sentence would be, “So I’m sorry if I’m not around a lot,” but instead I got what I should have expected: “Want to come out to dinner with us on Friday?” If his arm hadn’t been around my waist, I probably would have been off the couch before he finished the question. But since I was captive, I grinned and said, “Sure!”

When I told my roommate, she was ecstatic. She asked me why I was so nervous, and I exclaimed, “Because they’re his parents!”

We’ve seen it all—there are parents who keep you at arms length (because, after all, you are stealing their child away from them), and others who love you instantly and send you Facebook messages and texts. But no matter what experiences we’ve had or witnessed with our significant others’ parents, we have an inherent fear of meeting the people who raised our boyfriend or girlfriend. Why has everyone decided that “meeting the parents” is such a major event—it’s just being introduced to some new people, right?

Wrong.

Yes, our parents are those obnoxious characters who call us to ask about grades and bug us to book our flights home for Thanksgiving. But odds are that they have spent more time with you than any other person in the world. They know you better, they have dirt on you (including naked baby pictures) and they understand how you work, as much as you may hate to admit it. When a person is that big of a deal in your life, introducing the person whom you are seeing to them is a way of saying, “You are important enough to meet this person who made me who I am. You matter.” And deep down, all parties involved know this.

So maybe the fear isn’t just of meeting the parents. It’s the fear that comes along with realizing how much someone cares about you. Your boyfriend or girlfriend is willing to deal with that weekly phone call that will now incorporate the question, “So how are you and [your name here] doing?” Someone bringing you into their lives in such an intimate way, beyond the realm of dorm rooms and dates, means that they’re in it for the long haul.

As far as my “meeting the parents” episode, it went amazingly well; my boyfriend’s parents were welcoming, kind and tons of fun; we even went out again the next night. And honestly, things have only gotten better since then.

We’ll see how he does next weekend—did I mention my parents are coming in on Friday?