This Article is From Dec 28, 2014

Facebook's Last Taboo: The Unhappy Marriage

Facebook's Last Taboo: The Unhappy Marriage

Generally harder to find on the social network of more than 1 billion people is the documentation of strife, anxiety, discord or discontent. (Representational Image)

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, 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 more than 1 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.

"I certainly felt like a pioneer posting about my divorce on Facebook," said la Flamme, a weight-loss expert and author of "Pleasurable Weight Loss."

About a month later, in August, Keith Hinson, a 37-year-old resident of Orlando, Florida, posted the first of what became a sort of mini-meme: the divorce selfie.

There, on his Facebook page, was Hinson and his former wife, Michelle Knight, grinning, with their divorce papers. The caption was, "We smile not because it's over, but because it happened."

Still, those who have spent more than a few passing minutes on Facebook could attest to the fact that marriage is usually portrayed in an exceptionally positive light, more so than other areas of our lives. There is far more social acceptability to not only grumble but to seek input about the missteps in our careers or the sleep deprivation that goes with child rearing than about the possible fissures in a marriage.

Breaking the news about his divorce, said Ellsberg, author of "The Education of Millionaires," was a departure from the "smiling photos and professions of love" he had formerly published about his relationship with la Flamme. The response to the announcement, which the couple says they spent months crafting together, was met with mostly positive responses, says Ellsberg, who continues to share a town house in New York with la Flamme.

Like many couples on Facebook, they were managing their marital brand, even after its dissolution, creating and honing their message much like a corporate news release.

The glue of the Facebook marital brand is the relationship status - Facebook gives users many options to define it: married, single, divorced, separated and widowed, to name a few.

Changing one's status after, or during, a divorce can be fraught. Back in 2009, Penney Berryman came into work and looked at her Facebook newsfeed to discover that her husband at the time had changed his status from "married" to "single," an announcement of their separation they hadn't yet agreed to broadcast.

"I was still married to someone who made a public statement about our relationship that I wasn't ready for," said Berryman, 32, a marketing and communications specialist for a health care company in Austin, Texas.

Then Berryman revised her own status, leaving it blank and opting not to have the change show up on her public newsfeed. In the transition to her divorce, Berryman also had to alter other aspects her public digital life, starting by deleting some timeline photos of her wedding and other marital milestones.

"It was tough to figure out how do I represent this part of my life that doesn't exist anymore but used to be such a big part," she said.

So why does the social media screen tend to go dark after the wedding, only to light up with the occasional burst of good news? Perhaps Facebook is actually mimicking the real-life personal dynamic, where once the vows are exchanged, the marital code of silence goes into effect: The oversharing culture, which reigns during the engagement and wedding, suddenly morphs to undersharing about our spouses. Maybe there's not as much of a highlight reel to show after the honeymoon when real life sets in.

It has to do with vulnerability, said Sherry Turkle, an MIT 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.

It's understandable that people don't want to sound off about their spouse in a public forum. It's unseemly and hard to imagine that it could be done without creating further problems.

But the urge to talk about marriage and our spouses is there. People just want to do it anonymously. More popular than Facebook for marital venting are anonymous forums, like Secret and Whisper, where users post admissions along the lines of, "My wife doesn't know I smoke a joint every night when she goes to bed."

"There, you get what you are missing on social media, which is a whole range of discussion about abuse and cheating," said Turkle who has researched some of these anonymous confessional sites.

For those who aren't looking to confess something but instead want to crowd-source advice or support, is there a lexicon for a more honest dialogue about marriage on Facebook, or is a social network that has no "dislike" button not the place for candid conversations on the topic?

Ellsberg thinks Facebook could help couples if people posted in a way that took accountability, as in no blaming or finger pointing. Something along the lines of, "Does anyone have any advice about how I could deal with anger in a way that isn't destructive to our marriage?"

With the average American spending over 4 1/2 hours a week on Facebook (or, around 40 minutes a day, according to the site), is the one-sided narrative of marriage the equivalent of watching too many rom-coms that end happily ever after, in that way distorting everyone's view of the institution?

"There is a fairy-tale marketing of marriage that we all participate in," 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."

But Turkle doesn't think Facebook is the forum for those public service announcements. Facebook, she said, is the place "where you show your best self. It's a place for good news, not the place where you talk about your most vulnerable self. Marriage lies so close to the raw bone of who you are, so I think people need boundaries and privacy to feel a certain integrity to maintain the relationship."

Conjuring a thought experiment, she said, "Imagine the post: We are going bankrupt, and he is blaming me."

Even in an age when people post nude photos online, that statement seems unimaginable - no, completely radical - to scroll through amid a flurry of wedding, baby and cute cat photos that litter all of our feeds.

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." 
© 2014, The New York Times News Service
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