When my wife and I recently decided to separate, we knew there were going to be some awkward moments ahead. Many of these we knew were going to be focussed on letting friends and family know what was going on and making them feel OK about it. But we’re now in a brand new social networking era where if you update your status in a certain way, people are going to be able to read into it without having explicit knowledge of what is going on. And this specific issue caused us a bit of a dilemma.
We didn’t want to announce to people that we were separating prior to us getting our heads around what it really meant for us, what our immediate plans would be and what sort of reasons we were going to give to explain this unexpected event. So in order to not give the game away too quickly and be left with awkwardness, we chose not to do status updates on Facebook for a good few weeks. But after a while when we’d figured out what we were going to tell people and how we were going to tell them (a status update for us wasn’t going to cut it) we decided it was time to act. So we directly messaged as many people as we could, emailed friends and family (we’d previously spoken to our immediate families) and then did the funniest thing I’ve ever done. We demarried each other on Facebook. What an absolutely bizarre and ridiculous thing to do. I just found the whole thing so odd – and I don’t even know why! Also had a good laugh. Ridiculous!
Why is this such an odd thing to do? Any budding psychologists out there?
3 replies on “Demarried on Facebook!”
I’m sorry your marriage had to come to an end, but I like this article post. I remember when Ryan finally updated his Facebook with his marital status, it said that Ryan was “now” married to Dina. It gave me chuckles, what about before now? We’d been married for several years.
Yeah, it’s a funny thing I think because we use websites to validate our relationships… and other people react to these websites when they see the status updates! In the old days, we would have just wandered down the street and told our friends or have things spread by word of mouth.
I’m not married yet. I’ve never been in a relationship even but somehow I get your message. Though I’ve had an experience de-friending (and got de-friended) on Facebook.
It really such odd feeling when you have to end a relationship online. It’s frustrating enough when some relationship (friendship) ends, yet it’s even worse when we have to talk about it…online.
PS. Hope it’s not too late to comment. I just found the post. ^^ I love your perspective on the subject. Been thinking about it for a while but never put myself together to write it down.