At the end of July, Michael Ellsberg posted something truly subversive on Facebook. It wasn’t a scantily clad photograph of himself. Instead, to his 25,000 or so followers he wrote: “Jena and I are no longer married. This has been a heart-wrenching process for both of us, over the past year, and we are thankful for the support of our friends, family and community in helping us through this. We are on very good terms.” (His former wife, Jena la Flamme, posted the same message on her wall.) With those few sentences, Mr. Ellsberg, 37, peeled off the social face that so many of us maintain on Facebook when it comes to our spouses, illustrated by reams of photos that make marriage look like a constant (and happy) vacation, or seem to show us auditioning for a dating site advertisement. Generally harder to find on the social network of over one billion people is the documentation of strife, anxiety, discord or discontent — states that anyone who has been married knows are a natural part of the emotional kaleidoscope of the institution. Marital distress, it seems, is the third rail, the untouchable topic of Facebook. It has to do with vulnerability, said Sherry Turkle, a M.I.T. psychologist and author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.” “If you complain about your pet, your job, even your children, there is a sense in which these are external to you — the complaint is about what life has dealt you,” she said in a phone interview. “When you complain about your marriage, the boundary between marriage and the self is much less firm.” In other words, we see our partners as a reflection on us, and any hint of weakness, insecurity or conflict isn’t good for our personal brand, what we all essentially have been reduced to on social media. “There is a fairy-tale marketing of marriage that we all participate in,” Mr. Ellsberg said. “It’s a mirage, and it does a disservice to people who are thinking of getting married, just as painting parenting as all fun and games would be a disservice to future parents.” So just as couples have for decades, there will, at least for now, be a gap between the public and the private marriage. Circa 2014, the public marriage is no longer just the happy front couples put on at cocktail and dinner parties, but the unified brand they purvey to hundreds, even thousands, of friends and followers. As with the divorce selfie, it only takes one bold post or picture to shift the social media norms. “Maybe if people were more honest about their marital problems on Facebook, it would start a trend,” said Ashley Reich, senior editor of Huffington Post Divorce and Huffington Post Weddings. “For now, though, it’s something people talk about more behind closed doors.” comment: When visiting a very small village in Umbria we noticed that the buildings in the town center had hand written messages on them. We asked our driver for a translation but he blushed and said they were too explicit. It turns out that when a relationship goes bad (for all the usual reasons) the parties write their side of the story on the walls for everyone to read. Not very different at all from Facebook and this has been going on for hundreds of years. General facebook rule: the more professions of love, adoring comments, etc., the more likely the poster is headed towards separation/divorce. Posting a joint, positive message about the end of a relationship is just another example of facebook perception having nothing to do with reality.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 03:05:21 +0000
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