Facebook in particular has taken that which was conveniently tacit and brought it into the public realm. It’s this mutual visibility that makes social media so tricky – I know that you know that I know – and it has led to a situation where identity has become both performative and narrative: We’re always putting on a show, and we’re always giving a blow-by-blow account of the spellbinding minutiae of our lives. We’re the stars of our own reality TV series and a relationship, like the self, is now something that is available for public consumption.
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There’s a certain logic to the way in which many relationships pan out in an age where the digital self is as real as the version you keep offline (and where this distinction is becoming increasingly irrelevant).
The process can be visualised in the flowchart below:
It can also be described in the following steps:
- You register on a dating website, check out one another’s profiles and, if the sales pitch upfront grabs you, go on to read the narratives. (My favourite: “I am a fun guy looking to have fun and laugh again I just want to let me hair down and have fun again I want to just go where I want to go, and do what I want to do with who ever wants to do it with me”.) Viewing the profile leads to mailing a prospective date, to chatting online, to exchanging phone numbers, each representing an ever greater level of intimacy.
- You then meet the person behind the profile In Real Life. Based on this, you decide whether or not you want to see this person again.
- You friend them on Facebook (note that steps 2 and 3 are interchangeable).
- You both decide that you quite fancy one another. You go on dates over a period of several weeks, perhaps start staying over.
- You change your relationship status on Facebook from “single” to “in a relationship”.
- By now the relationship IRL has lasted a couple of months and you become known offline as a couple.
- You choose this moment to make the biggest commitment it’s possible to make with the exception of buying property together or getting engaged: you announce, on Facebook, that you’re in a relationship with a specific person. Your more polite friends click on the “Like” button.
- You write on one another’s walls and tag one another in photographs taken at braais with friends and DWs in Clarens.
- After a while, however, one – or both – of you starts ask themselves the question that spells doom for all relationships: “Is this working?”
- You decide that it isn’t, so you break up.
- Now there’s a kind of arms race to be the first to change your relationship status back from “in a relationship” to “single”. Whoever gets there first effectively has more power, because they’re taking the initiative and you’re on the back foot. When it comes to the status change, he who hesitates looks like a loser.
- Depending on the intensity of the relationship, you spend somewhere between a couple of days and several months weeping, listening to sad songs and drinking too much.
- During this time, you will have maintained the Facebook friendship with your ex, mainly because you quite like being able to monitor what they’re up to every now and then.
- You will have hidden their updates though, as seeing them in your newsfeed unexpectedly is too painful. Instead, you’ll allow yourself a once-weekly squizz at their profile and, from time to time, you’ll comment on a status update just to maintain a casual level of friendliness. It’s important not to be seen as bunny boiler material though, so you pace yourself.
- Then one day you notice that your former love interest has changed their status from “single” to “in a relationship”. Because this signals that they have moved on, you feel an irrational sense of loss, and, in a gesture that feels oddly liberating, you unfriend them (and also any of your mutual friends who clicked ”like” on said status update).
- One Phuza Thursday a couple of weeks later, you receive an SMS querying the unfriending. You assume it’s a case of drunk texting and allow yourself a quiet moment of pleasure at this incontrovertible evidence that your ex does care, a bit, after all.
- You go back to the dating website, start chatting to someone else, and the cycle begins afresh.
It’s worth noting that when Facebook started pulling pictures of people’s exes and displaying them as “Photo Memories” – thus spurring the inception of the group “Don’t show me pictures of my Ex!” – the Facebook dating drama became even more complicated.
Fortunately Facebook stopped doing this a few weeks ago.
Failed relationships are painful enough – and few things are more painful than failure in public.
