If a bad relationship needs to end, fake Facebook posts won’t fool us

By David McElroy · December 27, 2018

As soon as Christmas was over, social media sites were covered with pictures of smiling, happy families. See that one? Don’t they look happy together?

Wait. I know those people. They’re miserable. She hates him and he’s been checked out of this marriage since not long after they married. He calls her “the devil incarnate.”

And those folks over there. I know the truth about them, too. He wants out of the marriage but can’t afford to divorce her, so she controls him and drives him to drink heavily.

And on and on the stories go.

It’s depressing to me. The only thing that seems worse than a bad relationship is watching two (or more) people pretend to be happy long enough to make photos. They’re not fooling each other. They’re not fooling anybody who knows them. So why do they project this lie?

Early in my political consulting career, I had a politician get his family together for photos. It was the couple and three teen-agers. When they got to the studio, they were hissing at each other like angry cats. Nobody wanted to be there. And then the photographer was ready to shoot and he asked them to smile. They looked like a happy, charming family — right out of a magazine.

After the flash fired, they went back to angrily arguing — until time for the next shot. Then they turned on the fake charm. I had a perfect picture of a beautiful family. I wrote quotes for the candidate about how much his wife and children meant to him — how he was eager to change the world for his kids. That sort of thing.

But it was all a lie.

I learned as the campaign went along that this wife hated her wealthy husband but stayed with him for the money. (She told me that as she hit on me one time.) The kids hated their parents and hated each other.

It baffles me that people such as my former client and his wife stay with each other. It baffles me just as much when people who I personally know — people who I hear talk about the reality of their situations — stay with people who are completely wrong for them. And it baffles me that they believe people who know them are fooled by social media posts which look and sound like what happy people would post.

Why do unhappy people live such lies?

I’ve asked people and their explanations vary. Some have pragmatic excuses that are ultimately ridiculous and which suggest confused values. Others have explanations that shift as you point out why this excuse or that one don’t hold water. Often, it seems to boil down to something they don’t want to admit. They don’t want others to see them as failures.

It seems to me that the Christmas season is one of the toughest of the year for these unhappy people. It’s a stressful time for them — because they’re having to go through the motions of doing things together as a happy couple or a happy family, but they have to put a lot of effort into faking something which simply isn’t true.

Maybe this is why January is sometimes informally called Divorce Month. Although more divorces are actually granted in March and August, there’s a spike in divorce filings in January.

Personally, I think it’s because someone who’s going through such a season of faking happiness and pretending for the world finally reaches the point that he or she isn’t willing to fake it any longer. The person reaches a breaking point and has to get out or explode.

I think a lot of people decide to make it through one more holiday season — so they won’t “spoil Christmas” for everyone — and then they finally walk away from what everybody knows should end. (Many of which should never have even started.)

I would have once recommended that these unhappy people find ways to repair their relationships and stay together if possible, especially if they’re already married. But I no longer feel that way.

We only live this life once. It’s not worth it to go through life faking happiness. It’s not worth it to go through life pretending to have something we don’t have. There’s no reason to lie to the world.

Some relationships can be salvaged. Some people actually love each other and can learn to get along and become emotionally healthy together. That’s fantastic when that’s the case.

But there’s no good reason to live in misery — and waste the best years of your life — simply because you’re too busy living a lie to do what everybody knows you really need to do.

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The better I know myself, the more I realize that my core fault — and the source of many other failings in me — is that of believing on a deep level that everyone and everything in my world must be perfect, especially me. If I had seen any of this in myself as recently as 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it as a small failing that showed up only every now and then, but I now see it as the wellspring from which my other sins are born. It’s such an insidious belief — and one that can look on the surface like a reasonable desire to be good and right — that it’s hard to acknowledge it as the inner cancer it is. But until I understood this, it was always going to be impossible for me to get over my deep shame about my imperfection or to accept the love of another person, because she is bound to be flawed, too.

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

It pays to be nice to the employees at Walmart — and everywhere else, for that matter. I was just in Walmart to buy some kitty litter when one of the employees called me over with a conspiratorial tone: “Hey, David, do you need some toilet paper?” she almost whispered. She had found a giant package hidden somewhere and she said she had been saving it for someone she really liked. So I’m the proud new owner of 24 additional mega rolls of toilet paper, which are worth something like $748 on the black market. On a more serious note, be good to people when you have a chance, as this employee was for me. And remember that people remember the way you treat them. I wouldn’t have treated this woman and her co-workers a bit differently in the past if I’d known she would someday do me this small favor, but there are benefits to treating people well, even if that’s not your purpose. Be good to each other.

My neighbor Cora — a retired teacher — called me while I was driving to the office earlier today to remind me that she wants to take me out to dinner sometime. We’ve talked about going out together, but we’ve never gotten around to coordinating a time. As she was about to get off the phone, she said, “I love you. You’re such a good neighbor!” And I told her that I loved her, too. I wonder how upset the racists of the unquestioned Jim Crow world — only about six decades ago — would have been that a white man and his elderly black neighbor care abut each other in such a way. There’s still a lot wrong with racial attitudes in the world today, but small things such as this remind me that we’ve come a long way.

If you have children, it’s important to deal with how they might be feeling as they react to the fears of COVID-19 as the danger grows. There’s a lot of fear among adults right now, but children are even less equipped to handle fears they sense from adults around them. My friend Josh Whitman has experience doing a lot of things and one of them is school administration. Josh and his wife are raising two young sons of their own in a Birmingham suburb, and he’s been thinking a lot for the last few weeks about how this societal fear affects children. He’s written a short article giving some wise and insightful tips with concrete steps you can take to help your children during this time of crisis — things which might not have occurred to me — so I highly recommend it.

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