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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Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

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.

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