Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do (8 page)

But it’s not as though everyone is bound to complain—our friends don’t want us to call them either! The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that
31 percent of American adults prefer to be contacted by text rather than an old-school phone call, and 55 percent of those who send and receive more than fifty messages a day—most likely avid texters under thirty—say they would rather get a text than a voice call. Our devices and all this software are supposed to
enable
connections between people, but on some level, they seem to be sabotaging the actual human-interaction part of our relationships—and many of us appear to be fine with only
typing at each other
. It’s far too
annoying to talk on an iPhone because I always miss bits and pieces of conversations as I’m pulling the phone away from my ear to text someone back.

• • •

This screened-in stance is not only changing the nature of our relationships, it’s also altering how we treat and react to one other—and perhaps even our ability to feel the very human emotion we call empathy. Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar explains that
“emotional closeness declines by around 15 percent a year in the absence of face-to-face contact” and I have found this to be true to some extent for me and my friends. We feel less guilty “breaking up” or disappearing on someone we meet or chat with online, especially if we have not spent much or any time with them in person. It’s easier to ignore people or not reply to their e-mails or texts when we don’t hear or see them. We don’t imagine them staring into their screens, waiting patiently for a response that may not come for days. We don’t have to hear if they are upset. It’s easy to forget there is a
person
on the other end if we don’t hear a voice.

Once at my former restaurant, the Dalloway, one of our managers forgot to place a tequila order for a Margarita Monday party we were having and had publicized through every aspect of the social media spectrum. We had no tequila. If you can recall any of your experiences at the type of dive bar that is light on the tequila and heavy on the triple sec, you know that kind of margarita leaves much to be desired (and also leaves you with a hangover to end
all other hangovers). I was livid. I had colleagues, clients, and friends coming. On the phone, when she called to tell me she had forgotten, I was cold, sure, but I knew I was holding back from saying what I really meant (she was terrible at her job as it was). When we hung up, I immediately found her name in my phone and began to text her. I called her sloppy, lazy, and helpless. I would only say these types of terrible things over text or e-mail, never in person or on the phone. I am not even sure I meant the things I was saying, and when she repeatedly typed back “I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry,” I felt no remorse. The fact that she had a face, feelings, a heart, was the farthest thing from my mind. All I saw was the screen I was typing on, and clicking “send” had no equivalence to actually speaking the words to someone’s face. I would never have said those things out loud!

When we are constantly plugged in and our thoughts perpetually interrupted, I wonder if it’s not just our minds that are hijacked but our empathy as well. Whenever I have to confront an awkward situation, the people around me all say the same thing: “Just text it.” I remember being in high school and being given great advice in the midst of a conflict, which was to drop whatever I was doing, find the person with whom I was in disagreement, and face the situation head-on. Now we can sit home and write an e-mail or text them! Situation solved, until you’ve lost your friends and everyone hates you.

The manager at the Dalloway had made a mistake and ruined a party, but I had launched a texting campaign
against her as though she had set the restaurant on fire. It’s easy to escalate when there’s a device mediating our interactions. Words are so easy to say when you aren’t truly saying them.

Beyond saying things we come to regret and hurting people we don’t mean to hurt, the other issue with “electronic daggers” is that they leave a paper trail. Within moments of our conversation, the manager had screenshotted my harsh words, sent it to another manager and three bartenders, and then texted,
What a bitch
. Okay, I had been a bitch, but she was stupid to share that with my employees. All four of them, it turned out, hated her, and screenshotted her screen shot and texted it to me. I did the only thing someone in my generation would do. I screenshotted their screen shot of her screen shot and texted it to her. She quit. I still had no tequila.

In
Psychology Today
, Maia Szalavitz writes about a report based on the answers to a survey on empathy administered to fourteen thousand college students that found empathy had dropped by 40 percent. The report analyzed data recorded over thirty years and measured empathy with certain questions.
For instance, compared to students of the late 1970s, students today are less likely to agree with statements such as “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” Szalavitz expressed shock that the students did not bother to alter their answers to even appear more compassionate. “If young people don’t
even care about seeming uncaring, something is seriously wrong,” she writes. But why is this happening? Szalavitz speculates that perhaps it has something to do with all the time we spend with our digital devices. “You can’t learn to connect and care if you don’t practice these things . . . Though social media is an improvement on passive TV viewing and can sometimes aid real friendships, it is still less rich than face-to-face interaction.”

I’ve found that if I read bad news on a screen (via text or Facebook feed or via other social media), I am not as connected to it emotionally—I may think about it for a moment but then I move on to the next post. In contrast, when someone calls me and tells me the news directly, I can perceive the sadness or panic or whatever emotion they are experiencing in their voice—I
feel
that. Through the veil of a monitor, I don’t feel the same kind of compassion. On social media, we are being exposed to so much information all the time that I’m not even sure if we’re fully capable of processing it, that we truly feel the compassion we as humans should. I wonder if we are more willing and able to toss relationships aside, especially those that primarily live online.

A couple of years ago, a Swedish girl named Clare approached me with a Facebook message. I usually ignore messages from strangers, but for whatever reason, I answered this one. It could have been because I was bored, between girlfriends, or having a (second) bottle of wine. For whatever reason, I replied. We wrote back and forth, which quickly turned to Gchatting, actual e-mailing, text messaging,
and finally, talking on the phone. We were in touch about six or seven times a day, and always before we went to sleep. We video-chatted a few times, and I was convinced that she was every bit as beautiful as her profile photos had implied. It felt like the beginning of a real relationship. Our conversations (online and live) were open and flowed well. It seemed like we were building something. Clare was getting ready to come to New York for an internship with a fashion designer—which she had arranged long before she reached out to me—and I was excited to finally spend time with her face-to-face.

But three weeks before she was set to arrive, I met someone—in person. We started dating and before I knew it, I was making excuses to Clare as to why I was no longer available at the times we used to speak. She began to contact me constantly, trying to find out what was going on. She called, I screened. She wrote, I ignored. She Gchatted, I made myself “invisible.” For all intents and purposes, I dropped off the face of the earth. It was far too easy. I know that I would never have been able to ignore Clare if I had met her in person and built a real-life bond with her, but because we had spoken primarily through our technological devices, it felt less wrong to shut her out this way. I know it was rude, but, even though I’m not proud of what I did and still feel guilty when I see her status updates on my feed, it also didn’t seem unacceptable.

When we meet someone online, a connection can feel real, but at the same time, we usually feel less obligated to treat someone who’s basically a string of texts and videos
and pictures with respect, compassion, or empathy. It isn’t until we actually meet these people face-to-face that we grant them true compassion and human respect. Many relationships that begin in the digital realm are self-serving and easily disposable. We use online relationships (platonic or romantic) to project ourselves and be seen in a way we wish we could be seen in real life. It may be
real
friendship for one person, but for the other it’s often just an escape or a way to pass the time between real-life boyfriends or girlfriends, so when life gets better and we no longer need the distraction, the person on the other end loses what they may have considered a real friend. In a virtual world, friends are easier to manage because they are only avatars on a screen.

• • •

We may have three thousand friends on Facebook, ten thousand followers on Twitter, thousands of followers on Tumblr, and one hundred fifty “likes” for every photo we post on Instagram, but it doesn’t mean we’re connecting to other people in a meaningful way. In a
New York Times
article by Jenna Wortham,
a number of people described the social emptiness that can result from letting our online connections stand in for face-to-face ones. One young woman said, “I wasn’t calling my friends anymore . . . I was just seeing their pictures and updates.” Several told Wortham socializing on social media made them feel more alienated. And yet, it seems that many people are more interested in having variety and frequency of contact, rather than building real, in-person connections. Are we poised to become
a generation of sociopaths, completely shut off from the world of human emotion?

It isn’t just about being disconnected from real feelings though; Facebook and Instagram do create one true, real feeling for me: they make me lonely. Just last week, I was doing my usual fifth scroll of the day through Instagram (ya know, around eight
A.M
.), and I came to a photo uploaded by my friend Donna. Kelly! And Brandon! Emily was there! And Dylan! Is that Steve in the background!? They were all there! Where was I and why was I not invited!? Panic. I kept scrolling. Now an upload from Steve. A group shot. They were having so much fun and I had missed the best night ever. But why had I missed it? Why hadn’t I been invited? Did they all hate me? I was convinced that they did. I kept scrolling. It was quickly becoming masochistic. Next was an upload from Kelly. This was the worst one: a video. So much shouting, so much laughter. I kept thinking about how many other nights I had missed out on. I felt so lonely.

Here’s an even more excruciating example: About four years ago, I introduced my four best friends to one another. I basked in the fact that I had connected them and that they got along splendidly. I was dating Samantha at the time and it also turned out that our respective friends got along. And so we had a happy group of twelve or so, attached at the hip and always hanging out. Years later, and in a less-than-graceful fashion, Samantha and I broke up and the group split down the middle. We maintained our respective friend groups, except for one or two who defected from the groups
and switched sides (traitors!). While my most loyal friends never became close with my ex, they did stay friends with my ex’s friends and the defectors as well. Every so often when a birthday or a celebration for one of the other group’s members comes along, I am faced with the dreaded Instagram of everyone I introduced years ago and the two groups that split down the middle all hanging out without me. You see, according to the universal laws of bad breakups, I can’t be invited—especially because my new significant other would certainly come with me. But my friends are fair game. And so I woke up the other morning to a photo posted on Instagram, uploaded by one of the defectors, of my four best friends who were at a party. Not just any party. My ex’s birthday party. I’m sure there were fifty more people who attended but of course this photo contained the only people who would make me anxious and depressed. I spiraled into the kind of Internet anxiety and depression that can make you positive that you suddenly have no friends or that you’ve moved down the virtual totem pole of your social life. After maniacally texting my best friends and asking about the night, I realized that the photo was just a simple snapshot of a two-hour night, that no one was any closer or less close than before, that everyone was home by eleven thirty
P.M
.

Just as our real friends can make us feel as though they are fake friends on social media, as I felt that morning seeing the “defector’s” Instagram, our “friends” on social media can often mask themselves as real friends, diluting the actual connections we have with our real-life friends
whom we talk to on the phone or go out to dinner with. My friends aren’t close with my ex, but because of social media, I convinced myself that they were. As Bill Keller wrote in a
New York Times
op-ed,
“the faux friendships of Facebook and the ephemeral connectedness of Twitter [are] displacing real rapport, real intimacy.” Perhaps all the chatter we slog through on a daily basis is just “virtual clutter” that is not truly connecting us. So many of us rely on social media, Facebook, smartphones, and technology for the bulk of our communication—but despite all this “connection” (or maybe
because
of it), we’re not only experiencing less substantial relationships, we’re also feeling more depression and loneliness.

Mark Vernon, author of
The Meaning of Friendship
,
believes that our generation is lonelier because of our use of social media. We get used to what he calls the “tyranny of quantity,” in which we send and receive scores of short messages but rarely have a
truly
connected conversation. We are establishing or maintaining friendships through brief, trite conversations instead of face-to-face interaction.
In an aptly titled
Atlantic
article, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” Stephen Marche looked deeper at the issue and mentioned a study in which 20 percent of Americans cited loneliness as the main reason they are unhappy in their lives. Across the Western world, doctors and nurses refer to an “epidemic of loneliness that is plaguing their patients.”
In 2010, the UK-based Mental Health Foundation released a report entitled “The Lonely Society?,” which found that loneliness caused more than half of those surveyed to feel depressed.
Interestingly, many
knew
why they felt this way: Almost a third explained that they spend too much time online, rather than connecting in person. Psychologists and researchers have termed this ailment “Facebook depression.”
In a medical study printed in
Pediatrics
, doctors found that in addition to the “classic” Internet dangers of cyberbullying, online harassment, and sexting, one of the primary risks for adolescents is Facebook depression, which develops when teens spend too much time online in the intense virtual world of social media. How can you possibly feel loved by your friends when you are inundated with their most intensely exciting experiences all day long via social media and they are all happening without you? For teenagers in high school who are already dealing with cliques and mean girls and what lunch table to sit at
(you can’t sit here)
, watching their friends leave them out every day and watching pairs of them enjoy newly founded inside jokes, this can lead to the kind of depression that the UK Mental Health Foundation talked about. As if disconnected, depressed, and lonely weren’t enough, just as I felt when I scrolled through my Instagram feed to find the whole gang hanging out without me, many of us are also feeling left out. With a constant stream of friends, acquaintances, and long-lost loved ones on Facebook and Twitter raving about the amazing things they are doing and seeing, we can’t help but feel more competitive and insecure about our own lives. As Daniel Gulati wrote in the
Harvard Business Review
,
“[Facebook is] creating a den of comparison . . . [causing] us to recalibrate our accomplishments and reset the bar for
how we define success.” And the thing is, when we’re sitting alone in front of a screen, it seems as though
everyone else
is in the crowd except us—even though we are
all
sitting alone in front of our screens. When I see posts of my friends hanging out without me, I try to remember that the photo is less a snapshot of the actual night and more a representation of how much fun people want to show the world (or often their ex) they are having. We try so hard to connect, to feel like a part of the virtual inner circle or cool crowd, which is of course a construction. It’s all about presentation. What looks like a good time online is usually just a bunch of people at the bar staring into their phones.