Are you in a bad relationship with that attractive con artist called Facebook?
To find out, check all that apply. Be honest. Be brave. Be you!
Ready?
1. Things about the relationship that excited you at first now make you tense and insecure.
2. You don’t trust your partner to tell the truth or to have your best interests at heart.
3. Your partner spies on you.
4. You often feel used.
5. You spend more time talking about the relationship than enjoying it.
6. When you talk to your friends and family about it, it’s almost always to complain.
7. The relationship leads to unhealthy behaviors such as overeating, excessive drinking, stalking, lack of exercise and/or unhealthy emotions such as jealousy or rage.
WAIT! Don’t quit now, no matter how painful this is. Radical honesty requires endurance. Let’s keep going.
8. You’re afraid that if you leave the relationship, you’ll lose your identity and your friends.
9. You obsessively consult Google trying to figure out how to diagnose and fix what’s wrong.
10. Your partner manipulates what you see and do.
11. You keep swearing you’ll leave. You don’t. Or you do and come straight back.
12. Every time you’re poised to leave, your partner flatters you or sends you some dopey little video about how happy you’ve been together.
13. You keep telling yourself, contrary to the evidence, that your partner will change.
14. Your partner dresses up real nice, says “I’m sorry” — not for the first time — and once again you tell yourself you two can work it out.
If you identify with more than one of the above, you’re stuck in a bad Facebook relationship.
On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, appeared before Congress and promised to do better. He apologized and admitted his company had made “mistakes.” He called Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election via Facebook “one of my greatest regrets.”
Asked about Facebook’s murky privacy policies, he said, “I think that there are different ways that we can communicate that and have a responsibility to do so.”
When pressed on whether Facebook was a monopoly, he answered, “It doesn’t feel that way to me.”
It’s a time-honored formula for keeping a bad relationship afloat:
Regrets. Apologies. A concession that mistakes were made. The promise to communicate better. A vow to take more responsibility. Good manners, a nice suit and the plaintive phrase, “It doesn’t feel that way to me.”
While watching the Zuckerberg hearings, several of my Facebook friends issued a running commentary — on Facebook. Disturbed by what they heard, they vowed — on Facebook — to quit Facebook.
But where would they go, they wondered? The difficulty of answering such a question has kept many, many people in bad relationships. It’s hard to quit what’s familiar even if you hate it.
Ask my friend Ann. A few days ago, upset by the news of Facebook’s manipulations and intrusions, she announced to several people that she and Facebook were kaput.
“I have deactivated my Facebook account but I still want to stay in touch so please send text messages or email,” she texted me and others at 6:33 p.m. on a Friday.
At 8:31 p.m. on Saturday, she texted the same people:
“I couldn’t stand it and have re-activated my Facebook account. I have a mental promise to not take any quizzes even though they always say I’m wonderful.”
She’s not the only one of my Facebook friends who has left Facebook with a rhetorical flourish — only to return before the detachment is complete. Most of the others, unlike Ann, slink back unannounced, apparently hoping that no one will remember how loudly they slammed the door when they walked out.
I don’t say this with harsh judgment. I’m weak too. I don’t like certain ways Facebook treats me or the ways it encourages my worst self, but I enjoy enough about it that I stay, even though I worry it will hurt me in the long run.
Like all the others Zuckerberg is trying to persuade, I live with the hope that Facebook will clean up its act before it does any more damage. But even as I hope, I hear a little voice that says:
If you stay in a bad relationship that you recognize is bad, honey, you’re part of the problem.
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