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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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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