Modern Romance (22 page)

On the subreddit we asked people how they felt about the new ways of breaking up. A lot of people who responded acknowledged that they’d broken up with their partners via text or social media to avoid stress and conflict. One woman explained: “I didn’t have to look at his face or hear his voice, so I could be completely honest with him. He was a sweet guy but I wanted to move on.”

What’s interesting here—but also kind of scary—is that she’s saying texting allowed her to be more honest, because she didn’t feel compelled to sugarcoat the reasons she was ending things. Maybe texting means we’ll stop giving those nonsensical “It’s not you, it’s me” messages and become more direct instead.

At the same time, most stories seemed to paint a picture of someone who was using modern messaging to avoid confrontation rather than further honesty. This included many people who broke up in this fashion in relationships that were far beyond the casual point. Several users shared stories like this:

It was a normal day. I was supposed to meet the guy I had been seeing for two years for brunch. I drove to the place and he wasn’t there. I called him an excessive amount of times to no answer. I went home. I got on Facebook and there he was on Facebook chat. He says, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about us and I keep going back and forth on whether or not I want to be with you :/” And that was it.

I was overall surprised and couldn’t believe that was the way he decided to end it, even know [sic] I had seen him the day before and was supposed to see him that day as well. I did make him call me to clarify the situation after this, which made it worse of course. Haven’t spoken to him since for obvious reasons.

It was brutal to read. After two years the relationship was ended with a “:/,” not even a fully fleshed-out emoji. There were many more stories like this, with passive-aggressive nonbreakups that actually ended things way more obnoxiously, and painfully, than a face-to-face conversation.

Ending things by changing their status on social media without telling their partner is another way people break up these days. One woman told us: “In college my boyfriend broke up with me by changing his Facebook status to single. We got back together six years later, and then he broke up with me over text message. I should probably stop dating him.” If you start dating him again and he says he needs to stop by the “blimp place,” maybe brace yourself to read bad news in the sky.

This one is astounding because of the depth of the relationship that preceded the breakup text:

Back in June of 2012 when I was 43, my boyfriend broke up w/me via a text message after being together for 8 years! I practically raised his daughter, and had been totally committed to him [and] everything that came w/him. I was really offended and hurt as I felt that I at least deserved to be broken up with in person or at least on the phone!

Apparently the wound didn’t run too deep, though, because look what happened next:

After 10 months of no contact, his uncle passed away [and] I called him [and] left a message w/my condolences. We finally talked after that [and] eventually got back together. I still love him completely [and] have forgiven him for how things went down. And you best believe I gave him hell for the text! :-)

No offense, but at this point let’s take a moment to be thankful we are neither of the people in that relationship.

When I discussed this topic with people from my generation, they were shocked to learn that so many people were breaking up in this fashion. The younger generation has taken another idea that seemed bizarre and made it into a norm. Is it that surprising, though? If you subscribe to Sherry Turkle’s argument that the prevalence of text-based communications is leading to a decline in face-to-face conversations and the skills to conduct them, the shift makes total sense.

EXES LIVE ON IN THE PHONE WORLD

For those getting out of relationships, especially for the jilted, social media also presents an easy outlet to reconnect with past loves.
We heard many stories of former flames who reconnected over flirty Gchat or Facebook messages and wound up cheating on their new partners.

But even if it didn’t lead to cheating, having to see their former love’s presence on social media was tough for the jilted. “It makes it harder to let go,” one person told us. “Even if you are one of those unicorns that can leave a relationship with friendly feelings and a clean break, your self-control is tested when all you have to do is click a button to see how they are living their lives without you.”

The temptation to continue to creep on your ex over the Internet is nearly universal. One study found that 88 percent of those who continued to have access to their ex’s Facebook page said they sometimes monitored their ex’s activities, while 70 percent of people who had disconnected from an ex admitted to trying to spy on the ex’s page by other means, such as through a friend’s account.

Many people we talked to advocated a complete “unfriending” on all accounts, but others thought those kinds of social media plays created drama in and of themselves. Even if you do unfriend or unfollow, though, it’s hard to avoid your exes. As one person told us: “It gets complicated the longer you had a relationship with them. Can you block them on Facebook? Sure. But you have the same friends, or at least befriended her friends on Facebook. You’re going to see them doing the same stuff via pictures that your friends post.”

Some people have gotten pretty creative about how to solve the problem of the social media ex. One nineteen-year-old girl from Toronto named Cassandra Photoshopped pictures of Beyoncé over her ex-boyfriend’s face and put them up on Tumblr.

“If imagining yourself at your happiest with Beyoncé doesn’t help, I don’t know what will,” she told BuzzFeed.
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I personally have thought about this strategy and decided that other celebrities might be good as well.

Ladies, trouble getting over your man? Why not Photoshop in
The Transporter
himself, Jason Statham?

 

Fellas, does it make you sad to have those vacation photos of you and your lady in Hawaii? What if instead you were in Hawaii with the funnest dude ever: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson?

Ladies, are you sad when you look back on that romantic dinner with your ex who left you for your best friend? What if that wasn’t a romantic dinner but a stimulating conversation with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor?

Even if neither you nor your partner is being tempted to use social media to facilitate cheating—since we all know how easy it is—there is another trend that is seeping into modern relationships: snooping.

SNOOPING

If social media makes it easier to cheat, there’s no question that it makes it a lot easier to get caught.
Every interaction with someone online creates part of a digital paper trail.

This digital paper trail and the knowledge that our partners have this secret world in their phones can lead to what we will refer to as “snooping.”

Here’s a tip: As you read this section, when the word “snooping” comes up, read it in your head with a quiet, sneaky, Aziz whisper voice. It’ll make the section more fun. Try it now. Snooping . . . See?

Both in our in-person focus groups and on the subreddit, many people discussed how secretly viewing their partner’s texts, e-mails, and social media led to their finding incriminating evidence that made them angry and sometimes even ended the relationship.

“I broke up with a girl because of a text I had seen on her phone,” someone recounted. “We were in bed and she got up to go to use the bathroom. After a few moments I heard her phone vibrate on the bed. It was a text. On the lock screen was a text from her ex-boyfriend that said something along the lines of ‘Are you coming over again tonight?’”

“My ex and I both got into a bad pattern of checking each others phones and it lead [sic] to a lot of trust break downs,” said one gentleman on Reddit. “Most of the time there was nothing at all to hide, but before the last fight I found out she had been lying to me about going to a Bible Study and instead going to spend time with a guy she met at that Bible Study.”

And no, it wasn’t her new best friend, Jesus Christ.

So there you have it, readers, if your boyfriend or girlfriend says they are out at Bible study—they are more likely out boning someone
from
Bible study.

Even in instances where someone snooped and didn’t find evidence of cheating, the act of going through your partner’s phone can create its own problems. In seeking to make sure that your partner is being faithful, you may inadvertently breach his or her trust.

In our interviews people on the other end of snooping had varying feelings about being snooped on. Some didn’t care, because they had nothing to hide anyway. Many subscribed to the theory that if you leave your accounts logged on, it’s fair game. But others believed that looking at your partner’s screen is a violation of trust or that it reveals underlying jealousy issues. Some even said it was grounds to end a relationship.

One thing that stuck with me, though, was that whether or not your partner is actually cheating, these suspicions and the snooping that follows can boil into full-blown paranoia that drives you mad.

Snooping . . . (Are you still doing the voice? Just checking!)

One gentleman in a large focus group held in New York described how he caught his girlfriend cheating when her Gmail account was left open. He saw an open exchange between her and an old boyfriend and felt compelled to check it based on his previous suspicions. This led to the crowd of roughly 150 people generally agreeing when I asked, “So if someone forgets to log out, your attitude is
If the shit’s open, I’m reading it
?”

She was in fact cheating but agreed to end it with the old boyfriend. They worked through the issue, but it led to a dangerous downward spiral where he kept checking her e-mails, Gchats, and texts. The girl would change passwords, but he would crack them. Sometimes he found something suspicious, like deleted chats, and other times he didn’t. Eventually he found an e-mail that made it clear that the relationship with the old ex-boyfriend was not going to end as she had promised. They then broke up.

What was interesting was that even though the snooping ultimately helped him catch his cheating girlfriend, after that experience he felt in future relationships he would never snoop again. He felt that snooping only led to suspicion and paranoia that could break the fundamental trust needed to maintain a relationship.

His sentiment made sense to me after I took in all the stories in our interviews. So many people we interviewed told us that the slightest glimpse into their partner’s private phone or social media could spark an uncontrollable need to snoop and read more. One flash of an incoming text or e-mail from a stranger of the opposite sex or NBA all-star Scottie Pippen is all it takes to raise questions. People generally recognize that most of the time there’s nothing to worry about. Even so, it’s hard not to follow the trail once you find it.

In most relationships, the barriers to our private digital world break down without our realizing it. As a relationship progresses, a couple winds up sharing passwords out of convenience.

“Hey, honey, what’s the password on your laptop? I want to listen to that awesome Pitbull song on Spotify!”

“My password is ‘Pitbull’!” she replies.

“Wow, that’s crazy!”

Next thing you know, you’re listening to Pitbull’s hit album
Planet Pit.
Then a Gchat message comes up from a guy named [email protected]. You think to yourself,
Holy shit. Armando Perez . . . That’s Pitbull’s real name! Why is he messaging my girlfriend?

Is your girlfriend having an affair with Pitbull? Do you read the Gchat message to make sure she’s not? Do you possibly violate your partner’s trust just momentarily to put your fears at ease? It’s a conundrum you didn’t plan on facing, but now you have to.

Snooping or accidentally getting a glimpse into your partner’s private messages isn’t the only way to descend into madness. Simply reading the messages posted publicly on a partner’s social media is often enough.

A woman in one of our focus groups described getting suspicious when another woman was being very active on her boyfriend’s Facebook wall.

“This girl was just constantly writing on his wall,” she said. “It was just like,
Ugh, you know he has a girlfriend.
”

She became agitated and decided to check his text messages, upon which she confirmed he was cheating.

Men and women also described partners getting upset when someone of the opposite sex was “liking” a lot of Instagram pictures or even seeing certain types of photos.

One gentleman we interviewed described how his girlfriend would get very jealous if she saw Instagram photos of him with other girls or other female users liking or commenting on too many of his photos.

“One time I made the mistake of liking a photo of this friend of mine in a bikini. All hell broke loose,” he said.

These are not necessarily new problems. Is a girlfriend getting upset that you liked an Instagram photo of a cute girl wearing a bikini any different from a girlfriend getting upset because you ogled a cute girl at the beach?

All the mundane misunderstandings and fights that we’ve always gotten into in our relationships get reinvented in weird and interesting ways in the digital world.

One gentleman, Sean, told us a tale that involved him getting suspicious of cheating due to a glimpse of his girlfriend’s social media at a very stressful moment:

My girlfriend was in a ski accident. I was in the ambulance with her and she gave me her phone to call her parents.

Afterwards, I looked down and I noticed that she downloaded Snapchat. I didn’t really know what Snapchat was. And all that I had heard about it was that it was an app specifically for sending nude pics.

So I checked, and there were like eight Snapchats from this one guy whose name I didn’t recognize.

And I was furious. But I didn’t say anything. Because she was in a back brace. Which seemed like bad timing.

And months later, we threw a party, and I met this dude. And he was gay, which was extremely reassuring.

I experienced a version of this myself once, when my girlfriend got upset with me due to Instagram activity. I was taking off for a flight to New Zealand for a cousin’s wedding. Before boarding, I called her. I got her voice mail. I texted her a message saying, “Hey! Taking off soon. Just wanted to talk before the flight took off. Gimme a ring.” She wrote back, “I called you four hours ago.”

I could tell she was upset because she also included the emoji of the Indian guy with a gun beside his head.

I called her back and eventually she answered. I explained that I was busy packing and getting ready for my trip and that I knew I would have time to talk when I got to the airport. She said, “Oh, so you were busy packing? Well, I saw on your friend’s Instagram he posted a photo of you hanging out by the pool taking Polaroids, so I feel like if you have time to play with a Polaroid camera, you’d have time to call or text me back.”

I simply said I was sorry and it wouldn’t happen again.

A week later, though, it was Valentine’s Day. I pulled out all the stops. It was our first Valentine’s together. I sent her her favorite flowers at work, along with Fuzzball (a stuffed animal from the Disney Michael Jackson show
Captain EO
, to remind her of our trip to Disney World) and some chocolates that were the same type she had loved on a trip we took to Mexico together.

When she came to meet me at home after work, I made her close her eyes and walked her into a room where I had on one of her favorite Stevie Wonder records. When she opened her eyes, she saw glasses of her favorite wine for the both of us. Then it was time for the gift exchange.

I went first.

I said, “Hey, so you remember a week ago you were upset that I didn’t call you back before my trip, and you were mad because I was playing with the Polaroid camera. Well, the reason I was doing that is I bought you this nice vintage Polaroid camera and I was just making sure it worked before I gave it to you, so . . . here’s your gift.”

She felt HORRIBLE.

It was the greatest Valentine’s Day gift I’ve ever received.

HOW PREVALENT IS CHEATING?

Fear and suspicion of cheating aren’t
always unjustified.
According to nationally representative survey data, in the United States 20 to 40 percent of heterosexual married men and 25 percent of heterosexual married women will have at least one extramarital affair during their lifetime, and 2 to 4 percent of all married people are willing to tell survey researchers that they’ve had an affair in the past year.

In nonmarried but “committed” couples there is a 70 percent incidence of cheating. In addition, 60 percent of men and 53 percent of women confess that they’ve engaged in “mate poaching”
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(trying to seduce a person out of a committed relationship). This is not to be confused with rhino poaching, where someone tries to seduce a rhinoceros into a cross-species romantic tryst. Or egg poaching, where someone tries to seduce a delicious egg into their belly without overcooking it.