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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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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