The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  Ainsley is very active on social media, and her romantic troubles on Facebook started early.

  Ainsley has a nosy mother, who found out through social media that her daughter was having sex. One day Ainsley accidentally left her Facebook page open on her computer, and her mother read all her private messages—not her public updates. “I got caught for so much,” Ainsley says. “I was grounded for a whole semester of school.” Her parents are very conservative Baptists, and their daughter was doing many things that they did not like one bit. “[My mother] found out that I had had sex, that I had drank, and that I had done drugs, too. So it was just, three big things that she just found out about.” Things were bad between Ainsley and her parents for a long time after this—she didn’t trust them, and they didn’t trust her. Things have calmed down since then, but the experience changed Ainsley’s relationship to social media.

  Today, “if it’s ugly, I don’t post it,” Ainsley says, expressing the rule I hear from just about everyone. No cursing, no negativity, because “so many people, like, business people or people who are trying to hire you for a job, they’re going to go, and they’re going to look at [your social media.]” Most of all, Ainsley doesn’t “want to come across as being sad. And depressed,” which means that things get difficult when she goes through a breakup. She admits that at one point in her life she tweeted “sad song lyrics,” but then she quickly deleted them because “I don’t want to have sad Tweets,” she says. “I don’t want people to know that I’m sad and feeling vulnerable.”

  I ask whether the relationship that made her sad was public online. “Yeah, I made it Facebook official,” she says. “And, I don’t know, I wish I wouldn’t have, though. Because, when we broke up, he took it off of his Facebook, and that was, like, a sob in my heart and I don’t know why. It hurt that he took it off of his Facebook.” Ainsley’s demeanor changes as she talks about this, from outgoing, outrageous reality TV star to pretty typical college student struggling over a breakup. The pain she experienced watching her breakup happen on Facebook, going through the steps of untangling their relationship in public, is evident on her face. In some ways, the Facebook breakup and the taking down (or, at least, untagging) of photos are akin to giving back someone’s stuff—except that it happens in a way that all your other Facebook friends might notice.

  Ainsley worried about people noticing. A lot.

  “That’s what I thought about the entire time,” she tells me. “I was like, people are going to see this and think that I’m so sad. Like, wonder why we’re broken up and ask me, and it’s just going to be annoying. Plus I was worried about who was going to be ‘liking’ his, you know, [status], because on Facebook, it’ll say, ‘single’ on his wall, and I want to see who’s liking that. What girls are going on and are going to be like, ‘Okay, he’s single.’ So that was definitely a struggle for me. I would go and check it all the time.” It made her feel stressed, sad, jealous, and a thousand other unpleasant emotions.

  Even before they broke up, being public about their relationship on social media caused all sorts of problems for the couple. “My boyfriend, he was very controlling,” Ainsley says. “And, me and my friend from high school, he wanted me to stop being friends with her because I got into so much trouble with her. And so I told him, ‘Okay, I’ll stop,’ because I was so into the relationship. And then, I would go and ‘like’ a post of hers on Instagram, and he would see that and get so mad at me. And so it definitely caused problems. And he would go and look at my Twitter from before we were dating, and like, the tweets that I did a long time ago that don’t even matter, he would call me out on them. And I was like, ‘We weren’t even dating! It’s just ridiculous. So it definitely caused a lot of annoyance in our relationship.” Because of her boyfriend, Ainsley actually went back and did a Twitter cleanup of sorts, deleting some of her posts so they wouldn’t bother him anymore.

  This entire experience made Ainsley very cautious about being Facebook official in the future.

  “I feel like, if I get into a relationship now, I don’t think I’m going to put it on Facebook. I feel like it’s so public. I’ll post pictures on Instagram, if I get a boyfriend, of me and my boyfriend. But as far as making it Facebook official and having everybody … . Ainsley trails off, unsure how to finish this sentence. “I don’t know. It’s just, my business now.”

  With everyone worried about appearing perfect and happy on social media, going through a breakup on Facebook—changing your status away from “In a Relationship” to “Single”—can be complicated. There are ways to make the shift inconspicuous, but even then you may live in dread, wondering if people will notice. Dealing with whether or not to take down photos with one’s ex not only is painful but also can make it difficult to maintain the appearance of happiness and perfection. The requirement to appear happy all the time is hard to fulfill when you are going through a tough time.

  A painful breakup is also a reason some people quit their social media accounts for a while—if not permanently—simply so they don’t have to broadcast the process of separation.

  For example, Peter’s girlfriend broke up with him, and being on Facebook, he says, causes him a lot of pain. “It does,” he says. “In some sense just because there are still a lot of memories locked up in that social media. Because you build this profile, kind of stock it, you make it that representation of you and you try to make that authentic if you can. And for a long time I was the kid with the girlfriend, and you know, we have a lot of pictures up and that sort of thing. Occasionally, you know, I’ll be running through something and looking for a picture from months ago, and I’ll find a picture of us and it’s like … . he trails off, unable to finish his sentence. Peter is still grieving months after the breakup.

  Then Peter mentions that he has given up Facebook. I ask him how long it’s been. “It was last night that I was just like, okay, you’ve got to take a break.” The photos Peter and his girlfriend put up are still there. Neither one of them has made the move to take them down. “I don’t know if it will come to that. It might if I end up back on Facebook in a few weeks, if I’ll see them all gone or her tags gone or something.” Peter didn’t delete his account, he deactivated it—there’s a big difference. If you delete your account, it’s gone for good and you lose everything on it, but if you deactivate it, you can always go back and reactivate it again. “I did not [delete it],” he says. “When it comes to communication with some people, that’s the only way I can communicate, so I don’t want to destroy everything, the entire network that I’ve built. So I deactivated it, which is kind of an intermediary step.”

  I ask Peter how it feels to have deactivated his account.

  “It’s kind of nice just to not have that worry, not that I’m really concerned about Facebook,” he says. “Just kind of not having that at all, just being able to enjoy life in the sense of being present, not that you can’t enjoy life with social media because you very much can, but for some reason to me it’s been more of a calming existence [without it]. Especially when I was off social media for a while—I did it after she broke up with me too, when I was bored I wouldn’t check Twitter, I would sit and think and reflect and use that time for what some would say was much more constructive purposes than just seeing what my friends were doing on Twitter.”

  So this isn’t the first time Peter has quit his accounts, but both times it was a breakup that prompted him to do so. Being on social media, for Peter, is difficult when things aren’t great. “It’s probably somewhat of a psychological thing, that when you’re going through a difficult time and you want to talk to someone about it, I think humanity just in general, craves an interpersonal connection,” Peter explains. “You can’t get that through a computer screen, and I wouldn’t say necessarily that those [social media] connections would cause pain as much as they wouldn’t be too helpful to me.”

  Neither Peter nor his girlfriend posted about the breakup. “I don’t think anyone else should see it like
that,” he says. “That’s your personal life and really not anyone else’s business… . This is going to seem harsh to a lot of people, but if you’re going through a hard time or you’re having a rough time, don’t go to social media about it. Go talk to a person about it and deal with reality. Because social media is social media, and reality is reality.”

  EDDISON AND TARA: COMING OUT

  The moment Eddison walks in the room, I know I’m in for a lively conversation. He wears a big smile on his face, and his dress is impeccable—unusual for a college student. He wears a bow tie, a sharp tweed jacket, a pink-and-white pinstriped oxford, and hipster glasses. Eddison is African American and also gay, but when I ask him about his sexual orientation (for demographic purposes) at the very beginning of the interview, he answers, “I am in between now.”

  Eventually I ask him what he meant by this.

  “I know that I like guys, that’s the thing, but back at home”—Eddison pauses a moment to think, then goes on—“Me being here [at school] makes my mom happy, and that’s what I want to do. But also me being with a woman and having children makes her happy, so I’ve just been trying to find a way to officially say it. I spend a lot of time trying to make my family happy before myself, so that comes as a struggle. But here, I know what I want, I know what I want to do with my life. I know I don’t want kids and stuff, but when I go home she’s like, ‘When are you going to get married? When are you going to have kids?’ Yadda, yadda, yadda. And I say, I don’t want to get married. I don’t want to have kids. I’m going to get a dog. That’s how I’m going to live. And just be happy with it. But it doesn’t seem to work, so I’ve just been working on a better method.”

  Eddison comes from a big churchgoing family, and this is part of the problem. His mother thinks it’s “not acceptable” to be gay, since it’s not okay within their church. Because Eddison’s mother doesn’t know he’s gay, even though he’s obviously very close to her, it’s a relief for him to be away at college. It gives him the freedom to be himself. But he still misses his mother and likes going home, too. “At home I’m still happy, I’m just more in my shell,” he says.

  That Eddison isn’t out to his mother gets even more complicated on social media, in particular on Facebook, because Eddison is friends with her and several other family members. In fact, when Eddison became friends with his mother on Facebook—she required him to do it—he had to do a Facebook Cleanup, but not the kind that is done for professional purposes.

  “She told me when I went off to college that we had to become Facebook friends, because we weren’t at first,” he says. “I guess that was a way to keep track of me… . She told me the night before I was leaving, ‘All right, now you have to have me as a friend on Facebook.’ So I had to go on Facebook and hide everything that I didn’t want her to see, because there was a point when I was younger when I did post stuff about relationships. Or somebody like a guy that I liked. Facebook has notes—I don’t know if it still has it—but a notes section where you can write notes and everybody can see them so I used to write poetry and stuff to this guy. He didn’t know that it was about him, but it was a way for me to get it out there. It wasn’t ever negative. So it was never, ‘I hate you. You suck.’ But it was more so love and positive. So there was a point in time where I did post stuff about relationships. And then once me and my mom became friends that’s when I said ok, time to … . Eddison trails off.

  Time to what? I ask.

  “I think I hid it, but I could have deleted it because I can’t find that function anymore,” he says.

  That was the end of social media romance for Eddison. Today he is a different person on Facebook than when he first joined. “I made [my Facebook] more about the professional aspect of who I am,” he says. “I’d rather you see what I’m doing career-wise, what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, than to see something about a relationship or a breakup or stuff like that. When I ask if he ever posts about liking someone or being in a relationship, his eyes get wide. “No, no,” he says. “When it comes to relationships and things like that, I am very, very private. I keep it all to myself… . I feel like when you make that public, you open it up to anybody’s and everybody’s opinion and interpretation of what it is. And I feel that my goal is to make sure that I make my family happy first. Putting something like that on Facebook: ‘Yes, I am in a relationship with [a man],’ I feel like that’s unauthentic … .if I want people to know, Facebook shouldn’t be my way to do it.”

  What becomes clear as Eddison continues talking is that his impulse toward privacy around relationships has more to do with the fact that posting about one would effectively be coming out on social media, as opposed to coming out in person. He doesn’t want the people he cares about who don’t know he’s gay to find out through Facebook. He also doesn’t want to mention getting into a relationship on social media—not even a comment about wanting to be in one—because of the way this could get interpreted (and misinterpreted) by different parties. “I don’t want to lead people to false hope,” Eddison says, meaning he doesn’t want to lead his mother to think that he’s looking for a woman to date. “I can say ‘looking for a relationship,’ and half of my Facebook friends interpret it as ‘Oh, he’s looking for a guy,’ but then you have the other half, which includes my family, ‘Oh, he’s looking for a nice young lady to settle down with.’ So I just avoid it altogether.”

  I ask Eddison if it makes him sad that he can’t be honest about this side of himself on social media. “Well, no, that’s not a sad thing,” he says. “And as big of an influence as social media is starting to play with job searches and things like that, you just want to make sure you’re covered. Not that being gay is a problem in the workplace, but you don’t want that to be the first thing that someone sees about you, I don’t know … . Eddison trails off after saying this. When he continues, what he says is punctuated by a lot of pauses and hesitations. “I don’t want [people] to feel like that is who I am, it defines my whole person. So when you see that [so and so] is in a relationship with some guy, then it defines him… . Yes, gay pride … .gay, gay, gay, gay all the time. But most people think [being gay] may have a negative influence on work and stuff like that. So I just keep my personal life personal.”

  As Eddison continues to talk, several additional things become clear. He worries that coming out on social media—and having that go onto his permanent record—might jeopardize his ability to get a job in the future. Being gay is not something Eddison wants on his highlight reel. And though it seems okay for lots of people to be open about their romantic relationships on social media, he thinks it’s really only okay for heterosexual couples. Eddison feels that to be open about a gay relationship is “extreme.”

  “I think it’s extreme when other people look at it,” he says. “So not necessarily from my point of view but from other people’s point of view. Like, I can hear my mom saying, ‘You are who you are and I may not accept it, but you didn’t have to take it to that extreme of putting it on Facebook for everyone to see.’ So, I think it becomes a big deal. People make it what they want to make it. A lot of people choose to make things like that a big deal. So I don’t personally think it’s extreme, it’s just what other people interpret it as extreme.”

  So, his mother would think it’s extreme?

  “Oh, yeah,” he agrees. “My mom would probably blow a couple fuses.”

  I ask Eddison if he thinks he’ll eventually come out on Facebook.

  He answers with a flat-out “No” and then sighs. “Right now I’m just trying to figure out a way for my mom to be okay with it.”

  Tara, like Eddison, is not out on social media. She is a junior who attends a Catholic university in the Northeast, and Tara thinks social media can hide things about a person, and therefore complicate a relationship—such as hide whether or not they’re out.

  Tara is currently in a very happy relationship with another young woman at her university. It’s public among their friends,
but definitely not on social media. Tara isn’t out to her parents, and her girlfriend isn’t out to hers either. Neither one of them is Facebook official about their relationship. Nowhere on any of their social media is there an statement that announces they’re dating. “I mean, if you were to look, there’s Twitter back and forth or like things like that,” Tara says. “But there’s nothing that says, ‘In a Relationship with.’ Nothing like that.”

  This is the first time Tara has been in a relationship with another woman, and she thinks social media just adds another layer of complication to coming out. I ask Tara if she and her girlfriend have ever had the DTR (define the relationship) talk that so many students have today about making things Facebook official, or if she thinks they will ever go public in this way. “I mean, it’s more of a joking thing because we don’t think that it needs to be public because there’s so many people on Facebook that we wouldn’t necessarily tell them, ‘Oh, hey, by the way … .’ ” Tara says. “So we don’t find the need to do it, or it’s more of a joke when we talk about it than anything.”

  I ask Tara if it’s just that she is a private person or if she worries about how people would react if they found out she’s in a relationship with another woman. “A little bit of both,” she answers. “I’m worried how my family would act, react. As for other people, I really don’t care how they react. I’m not someone who’s like, ‘Oh no, so-and-so thinks it’s not okay, so I’m going to hide it from them.’ It’s just I don’t feel the need to publicly tell everyone, I guess.”

  I ask Tara if she thinks she’ll ever come out online.

  “Um, maybe, I guess, but I don’t know,” she responds, obviously uncertain. “Probably down the road, but not right now.”