Dating and Divorce, Facebook-Style

In Walter Kirn’s recent essay in the New York Times, “Digital Mistletoe,” he talked about last Christmas, when he spent the holiday alone in his Montana home, palming a mug of black coffee and feeling pretty lonely. He was divorced, in his mid-40s, the kids were with their mother, and his parents and brother “states away,” he wrote.  He decided to log onto Facebook and try and connect with someone, a “friend”, maybe a “friend” of a “friend”—as he also acknowledged that most of those on his social network weren’t really good friends, they were well-connected literati he wanted as friends in order to promote his new book. Then something somewhat magical happened. He posted on the page of a pretty woman “What’s shaking?”  She happened to be stranded in an airport, sitting on the floor, in a very bad mood. She answered. They connected. And now, a year later, the two are living together. Loneliness cured. Thank you Facebook. Kirn writes now, looking back a year at that Christmas Past:

“The holidays have returned. It’s been a year for us. It’s been a year for all of us, in fact—all of us in this great network of social networks that used to be called “America” or “life.” And it has not been an easy year for some of us—indeed, for a lot of us, it’s been a tough one. Job losses. Debts. Extended tours of duty. Loose-lipped adulterous Vegas cocktail waitresses. Cheer up, though. Be happy. Why? Because I’m happy. And you and I aren’t as separate as we thought.”

No, no we’re not nearly as separate as we thought. In fact Facebook might as well be Match.com these days, with so many people searching out a connection—any connection—be it a high school friend (or acquaintance or someone whose name you simply vaguely recognize but whose picture looks awfully good for someone now 25 years older…).  And that Facebook way of friending, which leads to some clever back -and-forth emails and– potentially—a date, marriage, whatever, has changed the dating landscape. David Brooks weighed in on how technology like this has changed the ritual of dating in November, in an Op-Ed in the Times decrying the influence of telecommunications technology on it. He wrote:

“Once upon a time –in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era—courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts—dating, going steady, delaying sex—was to guide young people on the path fro short-term desire to long-term commitment.”

Brooks is upset that the whole idea of texting to see who’s around tonight for a date, and social networks being plumbed to find someone to connect with—the way Mr. Kirn connected last Christmas—has stolen what’s supposed to be transcendent, spiritual and holy about love. “Love,” wrote Brooks, when approached as if in a Bruce Springsteen song “becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.” Well, maybe. But lately, not so much.

You can still meet someone at your job, at a meeting of your local college alumni chapter, at a bar while on a business trip, sure. But now you can meet a hell of a lot more people online, at dating sites, and at the dating site that Facebook has become.  An essay in the Economist in November, “Dating and Facebook” said studies show that males spend most of their time on Facebook trying to find single women and figure out how to approach them.  The author of this essay though, finds none of the poetry of dating and falling in love missing when taking the Facebook approach. He writes: “I may be more favorably disposed to technology’s impact on dating because I’ve always been lousy at picking up women in person and much better at writing love letters; the advent of email was a godsend to me, and that was how I courted my wife.” And he writes that the evolution of Facebook and other social networking sites have changed online dating sites too, from being a place where you had to slap up a photo and be pretty explicit—even crude—in describing what you were looking for. This worked well for many people, he says, but it also turned dating into more of a “supermarket experience, rather than a strolling around, window-shopping while enjoying the sunshine with friends experience.”  Facebook trolling, therefore, is window-shopping. According to the Economist essay:

“My sense is that Facebook is reducing the salience of that phenomenon: your internet-dating profile is now just your general online profile, and people can friend you without specifically connotating that they want to sleep with you.”

In fact the Economist essayist goes so far as to say that the “ambiguity of these relationships (on social networking sites) seems to me more like potential romantic relationships in, say, a Henry James novel, not less.” And less face it, any nostalgia Brooks has for those “Happy Days’ is for the television show of the 70s, not the actual era in the 50s whose social mores were pretty repressive. In fact Tim Carmody, writing on his blogging site Snarkmark, calls the past Brooks is nostalgic for one that was actually on the verge of a revolution:

“The real one was driven by technological and social change. Kids had access to cars, telephones, TV, records and the radio, and disposable cash. Cruising, malt shops, high school dances, drive-in movies, everything you see in American Graffiti—it might feel like part of the timeless social ritual now, but then, it was a revolution, a set of truly radical acts. Add the pill, civil rights and a swelling in the ranks of college students, and you’ve got feminism, counter-culture, the sexual revolution.”

For people like Walter Kirn, his technology-driven romance led to a very real, life-changing event. One would imagine, from the way he writes, there is plenty of transcendent, spiritual, holy love in his Facebook-originating romance. Yet there’s a flip side to all this—the  Facebook breakup.

A piece published last week in the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper said Facebook was fueling divorce, and is cited in almost one in five online divorce petitions. The site may connect old friends and let users make new ones, but it’s also being blamed for an increasing number of marital breakdowns. Plain and simple, the site is “tempting people to cheat on their partners.”  Perhaps, but is it really the site that’s tempting them, or is it the same old thing that’s doomed some marriages from the dawn of marriage–human nature? If anything, Facebook and other social networking and online dating sites may have made people feel a bit more like commodities (all those “window shopping” analogies…) when in reality, it’s narrowed the world a bit, making us less anonymous and, as the Economist piece concludes: “more like an old-fashioned small town, not less.”

According to that piece in the Telegraph: “Suspicious spouses have also used the websites to find evidence of flirting and even affairs which have led to divorce. One law firm, which specializes in divorce, claimed almost one in five petitions they processed cited Facebook.”  The most common evidence: flirty emails, inappropriate sexual chats and messages found on the site are used as evidence of unreasonable behavior (at least unreasonable in the confines of a traditional marriage).  The most outrageous example cited: a 35-year-old woman who discovered on Facebook that her husband was divorcing her. The woman, Emma Brady, said she read a status update on the site from her husband that read: “Neil Brady has ended his marriage to Emmy Brady.”