Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do Read online

  Mark Vernon, author of The Meaning of Friendship, believes that our generation is lonelier because of our use of social media. We get used to what he calls the “tyranny of quantity,” in which we send and receive scores of short messages but rarely have a truly connected conversation. We are establishing or maintaining friendships through brief, trite conversations instead of face-to-face interaction. In an aptly titled Atlantic article, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” Stephen Marche looked deeper at the issue and mentioned a study in which 20 percent of Americans cited loneliness as the main reason they are unhappy in their lives. Across the Western world, doctors and nurses refer to an “epidemic of loneliness that is plaguing their patients.” In 2010, the UK-based Mental Health Foundation released a report entitled “The Lonely Society?,” which found that loneliness caused more than half of those surveyed to feel depressed. Interestingly, many knew why they felt this way: Almost a third explained that they spend too much time online, rather than connecting in person. Psychologists and researchers have termed this ailment “Facebook depression.” In a medical study printed in Pediatrics, doctors found that in addition to the “classic” Internet dangers of cyberbullying, online harassment, and sexting, one of the primary risks for adolescents is Facebook depression, which develops when teens spend too much time online in the intense virtual world of social media. How can you possibly feel loved by your friends when you are inundated with their most intensely exciting experiences all day long via social media and they are all happening without you? For teenagers in high school who are already dealing with cliques and mean girls and what lunch table to sit at (you can’t sit here), watching their friends leave them out every day and watching pairs of them enjoy newly founded inside jokes, this can lead to the kind of depression that the UK Mental Health Foundation talked about. As if disconnected, depressed, and lonely weren’t enough, just as I felt when I scrolled through my Instagram feed to find the whole gang hanging out without me, many of us are also feeling left out. With a constant stream of friends, acquaintances, and long-lost loved ones on Facebook and Twitter raving about the amazing things they are doing and seeing, we can’t help but feel more competitive and insecure about our own lives. As Daniel Gulati wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “[Facebook is] creating a den of comparison . . . [causing] us to recalibrate our accomplishments and reset the bar for how we define success.” And the thing is, when we’re sitting alone in front of a screen, it seems as though everyone else is in the crowd except us—even though we are all sitting alone in front of our screens. When I see posts of my friends hanging out without me, I try to remember that the photo is less a snapshot of the actual night and more a representation of how much fun people want to show the world (or often their ex) they are having. We try so hard to connect, to feel like a part of the virtual inner circle or cool crowd, which is of course a construction. It’s all about presentation. What looks like a good time online is usually just a bunch of people at the bar staring into their phones.

  So, yeah, going on Facebook or Twitter can make me feel more isolated rather than connected, and certainly more than a little insecure about my own circumstances. Some people’s updates make it seem as though they have a better dinner or weekend or relationship or apartment or life. When I was single, relationships flaunted through photo albums (you know the ones) made me feel at turns nauseated, embarrassed, or tremendously alone. What’s worse is that when I finally found myself in a relationship, I was the flaunter. I couldn’t help it. The urge to push our relationships into other people’s faces through their smartphones and computers is irresistible, and every time we do it, we reinforce the tradition. I have absolutely been that girl who has made daily trips to troll my ex’s Facebook page, which has only served to make me feel more melancholy. And some people’s desperate, lavish attempts to represent life in the best possible light made me want to stop spending time with them in person. (We get it. Your boyfriend took you to his family’s Grecian island. We get it!) We can feel lonely when we see people uploading pictures from an event we weren’t involved in, or when we read the conversations people have in the comment sections of posts and find out that we’re not a part of an inside joke. And we can feel lonely when we realize that we don’t truly know most of the people in our feed, have not seen many of these people in person in months, and have not spoken to the people we thought we were really close with on the phone because they don’t talk on the phone anymore. Or we haven’t made the effort to see each other because neither of us wonders what the other is up to since we see each other online, through our screens, every day. We believe we are being social with all our online digital interactions, but we are more isolated.

  Even if my mother spent half of her day on Facebook—which she has never done, but for the sake of conversation, if she did—she’d be more likely to converse with the friends with whom she has built longtime relationships. For her, Facebook is kind of a spy tool—she uses it to see what her friends and family are posting, but in order to truly connect, she does what she has always done: she picks up the phone or meets someone in person.

  Whenever I complain to my friends that I wasted an hour mindlessly scrolling through pet photo albums and posts about people’s latest meals, I always hear the same types of scowling comments, like “I fucking hate Facebook” and “I am totally quitting Facebook, it’s ruining my life.” One friend has deactivated and reinstated her profile more than six times in the past three years. I have done so twice. But almost all of us come back, because either we feel left out, as though we’re missing that part of our “social” lives and want to find out how some people are doing; we miss seeing photographs from parties (nobody e-mails albums through Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly anymore because we must now share our pictures with everyone); we saw other people scrolling through their Facebook feeds and missed the feeling of knowing what everyone else was up to; or we wanted to use Facebook to meet someone through our friends. Facebook does allow us to communicate and stay in touch without much effort, so we miss it and forget what bothered us as soon as we’re out. It’s kind of like an abusive relationship you keep coming back to: you forget the bad and monumentalize the good, and no sooner than you’ve walked away, you feel yourself looking over your shoulder and wondering if maybe you give it just one more shot things could be different . . . things could be better.

  Some of my friends (and this is happening more and more frequently) who’ve made the final break and haven’t gone back to Facebook have expressed a relief akin to getting released from prison; suddenly they don’t feel so bad that they’re not in love/engaged/getting married/having a child/going to Thailand on vacation, and they rediscover the gift of free time.

  Free time . . . I remember it as if it were a dream; I used to stay home alone and not really think about what others were up to. Now I can see what they are doing (or liking), on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, through texts and e-mails—all of which can make me feel left out, depending on my mood. And I keep searching for connection—so I stay online, longer and longer, down the rabbit hole, emptily clicking through albums of quasi-friends’ vacations I don’t give a shit about.

  Virginia Woolf wrote in Mrs. Dalloway, “We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood.” We are meant to be introspective creatures and yet we hardly spend any time really considering our lives, passions, or relationships.

  So many miracles. And they’re all waiting for us the moment we stop gazing at our phones.

  4

  We’re “Friends”

  My mother joined Facebook in 2010. At first I panicked. Several of my friends had felt stalked by their mothers—enough to block them from their profiles—and I feared my mom would monitor my every move and that it would affect our real-life relationship. I also feared my mom would do some walking down memory lane and react, um, negatively
to some of the posts or pictures already on my wall. (No, Mom, I don’t smoke, and yes, that is my only tattoo.) Who even knows what kinds of horrible embarrassing posts and unflattering, late-night pictures from two years ago (a bygone era) are there waiting to be discovered by a bored lurker with too much time on her hands to click into the dregs of my Facebook profile? Or—in my paranoid fantasies—waiting to be unearthed by my mother. Thankfully, my mother hasn’t been much of a stalker. She joined Facebook because all of her friends had and she was feeling left out when they talked about their status updates and tagging each other in pictures. But a few weeks after she signed up, she fell victim to one of those diet scam messages, which spammed all forty-five of her friends with the message “Wow, my legs look AMAZING! I can already feel the difference! Check out my new diet!” along with the embedded virus link. Most of her friends clicked on it (my mom is in really good shape). She was mortified, but she liked Facebook too much to disable her account. So she asked me to help her with the “ins and outs” of the social network, and of course, I obliged.

  When we signed in to her account, I noticed ten or fifteen pending friend requests from people I knew she had met or recently spent time with. I started confirming the requests, when she stopped me abruptly. “What are you doing?! Stop!” she said. This confused me. I hardly ever accepted someone out of the blue but generally confirmed a friendship if a person and I had mutual friends or if we were part of the same network. My mother, however, was more discerning. As we went through her other friend requests, she routinely said, “I barely ever speak to her. Why would I accept her as one of my friends?” Or, “I haven’t seen him in months! I wouldn’t consider him a good friend.” Finally, there was, “Eh, I had dinner with her last week and it was boring. Don’t accept.” My mother and I gauged “friendship” in massively different ways.

  Her comments stuck with me the next time I signed in to my own Facebook account. At the time, I had 1,462 friends. Yes—1,462. If someone had asked me how many real friends I had, I would probably have told them I had fifteen good friends (except when I’m scrolling through Instagram and I suddenly feel positive that I have none) and about forty acquaintances with whom I was friendly. When I stopped to think about it, 1,462 friends seemed kind of embarrassing, so I spent what ended up being four hours of a Saturday afternoon going through every name in my friend list, trying to decipher how many of them I truly considered friends. My guidelines were simple: If I could picture their face when reading their name, I would count them as an acquaintance. If I had spoken to them (on IM, Gchat, via e-mail or text, or actually live on the telephone) in the recent past (i.e., within three weeks), I would consider them a friend. As I went through the list of names, I found that out of my 1,462 “friends,” I could not recall who 478 of these people actually were—not even by looking at their profile photos—or why I had accepted their “friendship” in the first place. Of the 984 individuals that I could at least say I “knew,” I had spoken to only 140 of them in the recent past. From that group, twenty-one were coworkers, one was my live-in girlfriend, another was my roommate, one was my mom, and one was my dog (whom I had made a profile for and then friended myself . . .)—all of whom, for the most part, I was expected to talk to every day.

  This information astounded me. I had let 478 people—whom I did not know at all—see my photos, read my status updates, and know my whereabouts. When I vaguely considered my Facebook friends, I thought of Amy and Brenda and Dylan and Steve. But the reality was there was this faceless horde that I had allowed into my innermost thoughts and private moments. Was it creepy? It was slightly creepy. Facebook gave me the cozy illusion of security and closeness. But the notion that only my inner circle is privy to my information is horrifyingly misleading.

  That word: friend. To me, it’s always meant someone you might confide in, someone you want to share things with, so when I shared photos and updates with my friends on my Facebook wall, it was always with the implicit understanding—or the unwarranted assumption—that the people I was sharing with were actually friends. When I got engaged, I got Facebook messages from around the world congratulating me. Sure, it was great to have the support and to know others were excited as well, but who were these people? I didn’t know any of their faces and could not pronounce most of their names. Two messages in particular stood out: “Kim it is Katia from Russia. You look happy happy. You lucky girl to find a man like that. I follow you forever and now follow husband too! Love from Moscow!” My fiancée (the one named Lexi with the long brown hair wearing a bikini in the most recent upload) was not pleased. The other message that stood out was a bit more disturbing. “You dumb lesbian. Marriage is between a man and a woman. Tell me where you live and I’ll show you a real man.” Oh, okay. Cool. So nice to get this message from one of my “friends” on Facebook. I quickly unfriended him. But why was I friends with him in the first place? And why had I ever called these strangers “friends” if even for social media purposes?

  What does friendship even mean in the context of all this easy clicking? We become “friends” with people who may have been on the fringe of the groups we hung out with in college, high school, or even grade school; random people we have fun with at parties; friends of friends we see once a year; or others we’ve met through work or our shared networks. Although they may “like” some of our photos or status updates, we don’t actually speak to many of these random acquaintances, who are often closer to “stranger” on the friend-stranger scale. And yet they know personal information about us (or are a click away from it) because we share it willingly.

  For many, the definition of friendship has expanded to include someone they are connected to online regardless of whether they see or talk regularly to that person or even particularly trust them. In some cases, we’ve never even met our friends. But we still tend to have blind faith in those we’ve brought into our circle. We become “friends” online at a much faster rate than we do in person, which is completely ironic, given that most people I spoke with claim to believe that face-to-face interaction is necessary for a true trusting friendship. When I was growing up, all kids were instructed never to talk to strangers. Now we’re running out and looking for strangers to talk to—sometimes if only to get our “numbers up.” The more “friends” you have, the more popular you are, the higher your self-worth . . . right? Right??

  It’s funny how quick we are to welcome people into our circle, especially when so many of us are more likely to lie in our online profiles or conversations that take place on the Internet, compared to when we talk to someone in person. When I polled my “friends” (so mainly a few friends and mostly strangers), more than a third admitted to lying online, whether it was about a topic as mundane as a favorite movie (to sound more interesting) or something more serious, like their job or relationship status. David Holmes, a psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, examined how honest we are on our social networking profiles and found that up to 40 percent of the information posted could be falsified. This isn’t surprising, as most social media sites provide their users with the ability to be whoever they want for whatever kind of attention they crave and don’t ask us to verify any of it. And we don’t ask our online friends to prove what they say is true, because we probably won’t be seeing them in person anytime soon.

  And yet we rarely think about those to whom we’re linked or what that means. I don’t offer a ton of personal information on Facebook or any social media for that matter, but photos and friends’ tagged items add up, and depending on privacy settings, friends of friends can sometimes see posts, so we all end up revealing more than we think we do, to people we do not know at all. I had an old friend—we’ll call her Allison—who took a turn down crazy street when we were about twenty-five. She had always been a little “clingy,” but her seemingly mild psychotic tendencies flared up at some point and I needed to take a few months (years) away from the friendship. (Think: Single White Female. Remember the episode of Beverly Hi
lls, 90210 where Kelly starts hanging out with Tara, whom she met during a stint in rehab? And then Tara tries to become her? And finds the same jean jacket that Kelly has? And then tries to force Kelly into a double suicide? It was actually nothing like that but I love that episode and my friend had definitely become creepy in an SWF type of way.) I stopped calling her for a while. She would call and call, and I would text back that I was really busy for a couple of weeks, or whatever excuse I could make. Then things got a bit creepier. I would be at a bar and she would show up. (I had checked in on Foursquare.) She would randomly pass me when I was walking out to lunch from work. (I worked in Times Square at the time at MTV, and I think we all know that no one hangs out there unless they are a tourist or an employee who works in the area. She was neither.) I recognized that she was obsessively following me on Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare and was pretending to “randomly end up” at the places I was; she was simply following (and mirroring) my every move. I had no choice but to unfriend and block her. I felt terrible about it but she truly left me no choice. I didn’t want to end up at an overlook spot tied up inside my car like Kelly! I made one mistake though. My privacy settings were still set so that “friends of friends” could see my profile and almost all of the information on it. While she was blocked from Twitter and Foursquare, her Facebook stalking raged via our mutual friends’ pages. The stalking continued, but she knew I’d blocked her so now she was mad. Luckily, a few weeks later she moved to California to see (stalk) an old boyfriend. My saga was over, but I certainly learned my lesson the hard way about what I am sharing and with whom I am sharing it when I click “Post,” “Update,” or “Check In.” There is no such thing as privacy online.