Their marriage is ending. They’re a friend, an acquaintance, a family member. However they’re connected to you, their announcement is rattling. A divorce lawyer has been consulted, lives are being divvied, a family is falling apart at the marital seams that joined it.
You went to their wedding. You remember their first date. You see them at church. A birthday party. A 4th of July at the pool. However your lives are connected to theirs, the news is shocking. You wouldn’t have called them the “perfect couple” because you’re past the age of fairytales and believing in Cinderella or The Little Mermaid, but they were good together. Just look at their social media accounts! How could it be ending now?
You scroll through their pages, looking for a sign of unhappiness that would have hinted at the beginning of the end. But there are posts of date nights, family vacations, smiling selfies, and testaments of love in a hashtag. Nothing that shows anything other than a perfectly happy couple.
A reminder of how little of reality is actually posted on those platforms.
I scroll through my own newsfeed. A few years ago, my husband and I were going through our own hardship. I was considering leaving him. I had young children, a full-time job, a mountain of debt sitting squarely on my chest, and a husband who was never home. He was working 14-16 hours a day 6 days a week trying to keep his business afloat. When he was home, he was angry and exhausted. I was angry and exhausted. Our house was very large and very rundown. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t keep up with the house maintenance, the finances, or taking care of myself. The stress at my own job was suffocating. I was just barely keeping my kids alive, but their home life was not the warm, loving, fun home they deserved.
I searched house listings and rentals looking for a home the kids and I could move in to. I made lists of items I would take to furnish our new home. I looked at neighborhoods and reviewed the finances. Which debts were in both of our names and which ones I could leave with him. I didn’t say the word “divorce” because I do believe in the Church’s stance on marriage being insoluble. But if I was going to be alone in our marriage, I might as well be living a lifestyle I could manage on my own.
But during this time, my posts to Facebook didn’t show much of a change. Not to the outside. Still the witty banter between my husband and I. Still posts proclaiming our love as memories on this day were shared. Life events and family outings with a hilarious spin on the catastrophes that ensued. Oh LOL!
But I can recognize the pain behind it all.
How those memories were shared because we longed to go back to the good ol’ days. How we both struggled to remember those people because we no longer recognized them in ourselves or each other. How it hurt to see what used to be.
How those exchanges in the comment section were pretty much the only time we talked to each other.
How an evening at the local pool really played out without the funny spin. I remember how I had cried that night as a family night of togetherness dissolved into fighting and yelling and another nail in the coffin of our marriage. How fucking hard any time together was. While my post included the frantic adventure and meltdowns, I wrote it in a way that made it a sitcom and not an episode of Divorce Court.
We caught ourselves before our marriage completely bottomed out by confronting the truth head on. We acknowledged our issues, where our marriage was failing, how we were harming each other and our children. We fought. We cried. We were honest and open. And we wanted to make it work. We finally began healing ourselves and our marriage.
But our profiles on social media never hinted at our journey.
Far too often, especially with the advent of social media platforms we use what we see from our friends as a measuring stick for their lives and ours. We spend so much time seeing others and their lives and think that because we can see their living rooms, we must be in the walls of their homes. We analyze and compare and try to match what we see on our screens. But those posts aren’t real. They’re a glossed over version of imperfection.
I don’t know if the answer is to be more honest on our posts because then it’s “airing our dirty laundry” or if it’s a matter of taking what we see with a block of salt and remember it’s dressed up for the audience or if all social media needs to be abandoned altogether. But whatever it is, we have to keep the focus off of measuring. Measuring up to expectations – theirs or ours.