Keep Your Marriage To Yourself
I will piss off even my blogmate with this one, because he’s done it, along with much of the rest of the social media world. But here goes: if you have something to say to your wife/husband/lover/girlfriend/ boyfriend/friend with benefits, say it to him or her in person, in private. The world does not need to know. It does not validate you. It sounds false.
Whew. I said it. Deep breath. Today, apparently, the social media world has gone Lady Gaga over Jessica Alba’s husband’s very public message to her on the occasion of her 37th birthday. I’m sorry, but I don’t know his name, so I can only call him Jessica Alba’s husband, which, by some reckoning, is what he is. He’s looking at her asleep with their children in bed with her, and he is overcome with love for her. I get it. Any of us with children have been there. We don’t even need to have Jessica Alba to have those feelings. Any great mother or father will do.
(And I prefer the Ryan Reynolds-Blake Lively style of interplay if we’re going that public with our lives!)
But to go nuts over Mr. Alba’s insipid post, or any of the other millions of similar posts on the occasion of said spouse’s birthday or anniversary is ridiculous and kind of sketch. Which is not to say that those same words are insipid if spoken in private to someone. Just publicly, they sound like you are trying way too hard, like you are sharing too much.
Here’s a very simple way to look at it: marriage is about intimacy, so keep what you have to say intimate.
A brief anecdotal study: everyone my wife and I know who have renewed their marriage vows and made a big deal about it is now divorced (except for my parents, who did it near the end of my mother’s life). My colleague who loved to post all the time about where he and “his beautiful wife” were going on Date Night? Yeah, they’re done, too.
And don’t get me started on Date Night — that is another artifice that doesn’t mean anything unless only you and your spouse know about it. Otherwise, it screams, “Look at us and how we are making time for our relationship.” Which also has the stink of doom, like all the rest of these public declarations.
Plus, you really aren’t writing to your spouse when you do this — you are kind of writing to your spouse, but with a serious nod to your larger audience — I love my spouse and I love knowing that you know I love my spouse. And that sucks.
The world right now has privacy issues, and I get that. But don’t feed into that by putting it all out there. Counter it by living an authentic private life that needs no promulgation. Full disclosure: I am guilty of posting on Instagram what I am cooking or growing and love knowing that you see it.
I have a friend who moved away, and from time to time, someone will ask me, “How’s _________ doing?” And I’ll say, “He’s really happy on the Internet.” Implication: less so in the real world. Which is true. For all of us. None of us can maintain that social media persona where we are always somewhere interesting, doing things with people who love to be there with us, eating the best food in the world, even if it’s in Arkansas, and constantly on the go.
You don’t see laundry night on social media. But so much of a marriage depends on whether clothes are clean and where they should be. Where is the “God bless my wife for folding my underwear” post?
I have another friend who couldn’t do something pretty significant because it was his anniversary, and I thought, “Really? You couldn’t celebrate the next day or the day before? It would lose all meaning if you did? This late in the game there isn’t a possibility of celebratory compromise?”
I just don’t understand that lack of flexibility or the need to broadcast to the world, to anyone among the billions of people on this planet who want to read it, however intentionally or randomly, your spouse’s qualities on the occasion of his or her ______. I just don’t get that. It makes me tired, like so much of social media.
FOR YOUR PLAYLIST: Uh-oh, a repeat artist of a sort, since both Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey were in the Db’s. “She Was The One” comes from a later reunion.
