The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  While many students are out on social media, many others are concerned about how openly identifying as LGBTQ might affect their professional futures and their social and familial lives. The possibility that adding “gay” or “lesbian” to one’s highlight reel might cause them trouble is something they worry about. Eddison especially seems to be living out the social media divide: sticking to the “Everything is great!” veneer one is supposed to present online, while leaving off anything that might be perceived as “negative” or worrisome to others. What’s sad, of course, is that the “negative” Eddison leaves out is his sexual orientation. He is hiding a core part of himself from a social media world in which he participates nearly constantly.

  DINAH: FACEBOOK IS THE NEW MATCHMAKER

  Dinah, the young Orthodox Jewish woman we met earlier who doesn’t go on social media, has fascinating things to say about how social media is affecting the way Orthodox Jews find potential husbands and wives, taking the notion of making your relationship status “official” to a new level.

  But first, she says, she needs to explain what Orthodox Jews believe about dating in general. “As a rule, religious Jews date to marry. We don’t date for recreation,” she tells me. “Most [non-Orthodox] people, from what I’ve seen, have a boyfriend to have a boyfriend. Or have a girlfriend to have a girlfriend. And we don’t do that. So I will date someone as dating not as hanging out, [but] to see if he may be the one I want to marry and for him to see if I might be the one that he wants to marry. It may be set up by my father, it may be set up by a friend. If I met someone who I wanted to date, I could, but my father is my father, and I would have to tell him in advance. So I haven’t had any boyfriends because even if I were dating someone, we don’t consider them boyfriends—they are the boy you’re dating until you get engaged. And then they’re your fiancé or your chossen, which is Hebrew for groom.”

  Orthodox Jews find each other online today just like everybody else does, though there are a few significant differences. On Jewish dating websites, according to Dinah, “You submit what’s called a résumé, and it details what you’re looking for in a guy, what your background is, what your family’s background is.” The biggest difference? After you submit the résumé, it isn’t the computer that does the matching for you. There isn’t some online algorithm that puts people together. Actual people are behind the computers. “They’re called shadchanim, which are basically matchmakers,” Dinah says. “They match up the résumés and decide, this person should go out with this person and this person should go out with this person. There are real-life shadchanim also. You can go to a shadchan, submit your résumé, have them talk to you, and then have them set you up with someone. But that it’s online now is interesting.”

  One of the notable things about going to an online shadchan, Dinah tells me, is that you can get matched with someone who’s not in your own community. The person could be anywhere, which opens up many new possibilities. “And you can specify, I think, how far you want to go,” how far you are willing to travel to find a possible match. And while this widens the pool of possible matches, distance can be a challenge. Dinah almost went out with a boy who lived four hours from her house. “We went to go meet, and the whole time I was thinking, so if we end up going out will he come here? … .The girl goes to the boy first, if it’s far enough away, and they go out once or twice depending on the length of the stay. And then the boy will come up, say, for a weekend, and go out with the girl, like, two or three times, and then he’ll go back home, and the girl will come and do the same thing. It’s really difficult and really strange. And if you end up getting engaged, then there’s the whole, well, ‘Where are we going to hold the engagement party?’ The wedding is usually held where the girl lives. And there may be multiple engagement parties, it’s just difficult, so a lot of people don’t want to do [long-distance dating].”

  I ask if the Internet and social media platforms like Facebook help ease the strain of distance. “Traditionally you don’t communicate with the person you’re going out with,” Dinah says. “Not to say it never happens. Usually they date frequently enough that it’s not that weird.” Also, Dinah explains, there is the miracle of Skype. If the couple lives far enough away, they may have Skype dates—approved and chaperoned—but not the traditionalists, she says. They don’t even allow people from different towns to date. “So if you’re dating an out-of-town boy, chances are your family isn’t going to really object to Skype dating. But then Skype dates are like regular dates. You don’t just decide, ‘Oh, I want to talk to him, let’s Skype him.’ You make an appointment, and you talk about dating-type stuff, for say two or three hours, and then you hang up. So it’s like going on a real date but minus the food.”

  Remembering how Alima’s Muslim faith shapes her behavior on social media, I ask Dinah whether Facebook and other platforms are similarly complicated for young, unmarried Orthodox Jews. How does one navigate online “friendships” with someone you might like to date? Are boys and girls outside each other’s families even allowed to be “friends” on Facebook?

  “Typically, it’s discouraged, [but] most people I know probably don’t care,” Dinah says. “And if they really think their parents are going to have a problem with it, then they block their parents from their Facebook account.” She pauses, then tries to explain. “Okay, let’s put it this way: if you’re friending a boy on Facebook, you’re probably also talking to boys in real life. It’s highly unlikely that you’re going to friend a boy if you aren’t speaking to them. [At a traditionalist university] where they have different times for the boys and the girls to have classes, you technically go to school with boys, but they’re not in your classes, so you have no reason to know anyone and you don’t friend them on Facebook and you don’t know they exist.” At a public university like the one Dinah attends, however, everything is different. “You may be in a class with two other Jews, and one of them is a boy or both of them are boys. You’re not going to ignore each other usually because they’re boys. Here, I’ve been in classes with boys, I’ve been lab partners with boys, and it wouldn’t be strange if I friended a boy on Facebook.” Dinah laughs. “And my father’s understanding of social media is nonexistent.” She laughs again and says, “If he found out I friended a boy on Facebook, he would probably freak out, and I would have to explain it to him, and he still wouldn’t really get it, but he would probably calm down while I tell him, ‘Well, everyone does this, it isn’t so weird, I talk to him in school.’ ”

  Once you have that friend on Facebook, though, flirting and falling for one another become temptations. Some girls Dinah knows don’t ever friend boys on Facebook, for exactly this reason. “It’s kind of a little on the scandalous side to go out with a boy you met, rather than a boy you were set up with,” she explains. “There’s actually a known entity of people who will go to a shadchan and say, ‘Hi, my daughter wants to date this boy, and can you be the shadchan for them?’ It’s a little weird. It happens quite often, but it’s kept very quiet.”

  For Orthodox Jewish parents who’ve ended up in this predicament—they have a son or daughter who met a person and then struck up a relationship of sorts online. Now their children want to date each other. Going to a shadchan to request that this person make official a match that the young people have already made with each other unofficially is a means of saving face. It’s one way the Orthodox community is coping with the fact that social media makes flirting and connecting easy for young, unmarried men and women outside the boundaries of tradition and their families.

  “I have a friend who actually wants to do this,” Dinah admits. “She met a boy here [at school], she was in classes with him, she friended him on Facebook. Her parents did not know.” Dinah sighs. “Not that she was actively hiding it from them, but she didn’t hide it any more than she hides everything else… . She finally told her mother about two weeks ago … and so [in theory] her mother would then go to a shadchan and say, ‘Would you set these
two up?’ And then they would go out dating officially. I don’t know if it’s going to happen [with my friend], but it does happen. This is what happens when you go on Facebook, and when you go to school with boys.”

  I ask Dinah if she thinks that two young people dating because “they met,” not because “they were set up” by their parents via a matchmaker, happens more now because of social media. Yes, she tells me. Before, “it was very hard for girls to meet boys… . If you saw your neighbor in the supermarket, you weren’t allowed to talk to him,” Dinah says. “Now people are going to college and all of a sudden they’re meeting boys … .[and] now it’s much easier to stay in touch with them because no one’s watching over your shoulder while you’re online.” She pauses, reflecting for a moment. “So I think that online definitely has a lot to do with boys and girls communicating more, but it’s just easier to be secret about it.” Dinah backtracks and explains that there have always been boys and girls who’ve met and fallen in love in secret. But the Internet and social media make it far easier to do this today. “The Internet makes everything else easier to do. It’s easier to find recipes, it’s easier to find songs, it’s easier to find other people who have the same crazy chronic medical conditions as you do. It’s easy to find everything, so of course it’s easier to find boys. It’s a side effect of the Internet,” Dinah offers. “Which a lot of people don’t like, and that’s why there are some people who are Orthodox who don’t use Facebook.”

  One last time, I decide to press Dinah about whether this has anything to do with her own shunning of social media.

  Dinah grins. “Nope,” she says.

  HANNAH: THE FACEBOOK (RELATIONSHIP) CLEANUP

  While Ainsley mentioned in passing that she did a Twitter cleanup to get her overbearing boyfriend to stop bothering her about past tweets, Hannah, the “manicurist,” tells me about an alternate version of the Facebook Cleanup. Hannah didn’t want to make her current relationship public, precisely to avoid some of the problems cited by Ainsley and Peter. Like Ainsley, she’s been burned before. And she had a long conversation with her current boyfriend when the topic of making their relationship Facebook official came up.

  “I said, ‘Look, it’s difficult for me to put this relationship status with you on Facebook because if we were to break up, everybody would be in my business, and if we were to break up, that would be a time when I needed to be alone, and needed to be introspective,” Hannah says. “And I’ve had failed relationships in the past that have been on Facebook, so I don’t need people knowing my business. I think it was a source of tension, because he was like, ‘If you really love me, you’ll do it because I don’t want you to be embarrassed of me.’ ”

  Hannah eventually relented, deciding it’s probably not a big deal, since she plans on being with her current boyfriend for a long time. She feels more serious about him than she’s ever felt about anyone. “He sort of talked me through it. But now I kind of like it because I like posting pictures of us that I like together.”

  But it hasn’t been all roses either. “It’s definitely caused conflict,” Hannah tells me. “If I had pictures up still from another guy that I was seeing, he was like, ‘Can you please take those down?’ He was going through my entire Facebook, so I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to go through yours if you’re doing that to mine.’ So he had this long post about this girl he had dated, like, ‘I love you, I’m so glad we’ve been together for this long,’ blah blah blah. Then he had song lyrics to a song that he was, like, ‘This is our [his and Hannah’s] song,’ but he had the song lyrics with that girl [too], and I was just like, ‘But you used that song with me! You can’t use the song with both of us!’ ” Both Hannah and her boyfriend saw all the different women and men each other had “liked” in the past, which caused conflict and hurt feelings, as well as raising questions about why each person had chosen to “like” a certain post or photo.

  It was these sorts of unpleasant discoveries that prompted their own version of the Facebook Cleanup, so they could make their relationship look like the only relationship either one of them had ever had.

  “We definitely went through every single social media post,” Hannah says. “And we’re like, ‘Delete that. Delete that. Delete that,’ because we wanted to have this image that we were together.” They did this together, but Hannah insists that it was all her boyfriend’s idea.

  ON FRIENDSHIP: COLLEGE IS SO PERSONAL.

  With each student I interviewed, one of the first questions I asked was, “How did you meet your friends at college?” I brought up this subject prior to any conversation about students’ online lives because I wondered whether students would tell me that they met their friends online. But out of nearly two hundred interviews, only a handful of students told me that they met their college friends through Facebook or other social media platforms. Most often, using social media was a way of getting to know their roommate before they arrived on campus, or checking out a Facebook page created to give soon-to-arrive first-year students a place to connect. But finding an actual friend this way, especially after arriving on campus, was exceedingly rare.

  College students do not meet their friends through social media. They meet them in person—in dorms, in classes, through activities, or through other friends—and they like it that way. In other words, the ways in which college students meet each other on campus are the same ways that college students have always met each other on campus. Social media exists, sure, and someone may meet a potential friend in person and then log on to check that person out. Social media certainly facilitates making plans, but it is rarely the starting point for a new friendship.

  For the students I spoke with, the idea that they would initiate contact and get to know a potential friend via social media—without having already met them in person—was unpleasant, uncomfortable, even icky and weird. They are not interested in meeting people on social media. Social media is a useful tool for maintaining friendships (especially long-distance ones) and making further contact, but not for an introduction to someone new. Students use social media as a convenient way to send group messages and announce a party, for chatting about class assignments, or for deciding where to meet up later. This aside, the college students I spoke with were delighted that being on a college campus offers them a physical, interpersonal space where the possibility of meeting friends is everywhere you turn. They worry that—because of social media—soon these face-to-face meetings might go away.

  I mention this for two reasons. First, many adults today seem to think that the generations coming up no longer have interpersonal skills. They assume that young people interact only through social media and aren’t interested in face-to-face interactions. Second, and most important, there is so much speculation that the college campus experience of the future (or at least a lot of it) will occur online. While one can make both a convenience argument and an economic argument in favor of online courses, the more we “upload,” the more we are taking away from young adults who are at college to learn, yes, but also to live.

  It may seem like they’re online all the time, but they do not want to live there.

  At its best, social media functions as a tool for navigating one’s relationships. It is not a replacement for those relationships.3 Relationships still happen in person—and young adults prefer it that way. They don’t want social media to go away, but they really don’t want the real world of face-to-face interactions to go away.

  Students were split almost evenly between those who felt that social media—because it is such a great tool for keeping in touch—makes friendships “easier to maintain” over the long term, and those who felt that social media is making all of our relationships more “shallow” and “superficial.” Some were simply thrilled that social media allows everyone to stay connected to each other, especially friends and loved ones who live in faraway places. Right alongside them were those who mourn the way social media allows everyone to “pretend” they have tons of real
ly great friends, yet who believe that the quality of those friendships has plummeted dramatically, robbing them of the face-to-face joys and responsibilities that go along with true friendship. Even students who expressed their approval of the way social media allows people to keep in contact had complaints about the downside of relationships on social media: that friendships “need to be verified” publicly, and that just because friendships are “numerous” doesn’t mean they have any depth or real commitment. Some lament that nobody really talks anymore, and that “friend has changed as a word” because of Facebook.

  It’s not only friendships, either, that college students still prefer to strike up in person. When it comes to dating, romance, sex, and hooking up, their preference for an in-person, face-to-face spark is undeniable.

  9

  THE ETHICS OF SEXTING

  TINDER, DATING, AND THE PROMISE OF MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION

  Sexting responsibly would mean, if you’re not sending your pictures or, like, sexy text messages to somebody you don’t know.

  Jeremy, sophomore, Catholic university

  I do not know of any peers who engage in [sexting] now, as it is widely known to negatively impact your reputation on campus. We are now adults as well, and many more worry about their futures, and whether or not future employers will see these images. At least, I do.

  Erin, junior, evangelical Christian college

  LAUREN: A TOTAL DATING FAIL

  Lauren, a sophomore at a public university, tried to use Facebook to spark a romantic connection with a guy she’s interested in. He’s in one of her classes, but they’ve never actually spoken.

  “There’s this guy in sociology class—he’s beautiful,” she begins. “He’s a basketball player, and the cutest thing ever! But, yeah, I like, creeped on him on Facebook and Twitter to see if he had a girlfriend. He doesn’t, but I’ve also tried to talk to him on there [on Facebook], and he hasn’t said anything to me, so I’m just like, eh,” she adds with a shrug. College students talk a lot about “creeping” on people, which means gathering information about people from their social media accounts. It can apply to friends and acquaintances and even people you’ve never met, but when students creep on someone, it’s usually someone in whom they have a romantic interest.