After the second text/IM about my Facebook post last night I felt it was time to clear up what I meant. My friend Su later shared a quote (obviously and hilariously) misattributed to Abraham Lincoln, “The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you never can know if they are genuine.” I get that. I can be rather misleading at times. My words seem to point to emotions that often are not there. Last night I wrote, “I’d love to say I’m surprised by the number of people who unfriended me since my divorce, but I am more and more aware of the conditional nature of relationships and am only recently settling into the idea of what relationships existed purely under the condition of marriage.”
The statement was a reflection on the friends and family that I lost in the divorce. No, let me use clearer language than that. I did not lose them. They switched me out of their lives like a dead battery, erasing sometimes 15 years of a relationship in a keystroke. It should’ve made me really angry but it only made me sad. It also made me wonder what lies and stories they’d decided to concoct to explain my sudden absence from their lives. Perhaps you can just say, “Oh they are divorced, so he no longer exists.” I think that answer leaves that person open to the question of, why doesn’t he exist anymore? The answer: Subjective Reality.
As I write this my head is spinning from the doublespeak and straight up foolishness forcefully ejected from the mouth of Trump’s campaign spokeswoman. She is confidently clinging to the story that thousands of Muslim people in New Jersey were watching and cheering the fall of the Twin Towers. To support her claim she says that hundreds of Trump supporters have called in to say they too saw this go down. See, that is the very definition of subjective reality. Thousands upon thousands have claimed to see Tupac walking around after being buried. More still believe Elvis Presley never actually died; in fact that false hope birthed the Elvis impersonator surge that followed his death. All three of the groups I mentioned believe absolutely that what they say is real and the way things are. Their reality is shaped by this. It doesn’t necessarily correspond with what is really happening outside of their own heads. My argument is that it doesn’t have to. If you are wondering how that connects to people deleting me from their lives, it is simply the next step in that chain of events.
My primary complaint about so many people deleting me from their lives is one of subjective reality. They decided to boil down the whole of our relationship to one connection–the one between myself and my ex or them and my ex. They made a choice then to sever bonds that had grown bark and engage in a false narrative that allows them to so quickly dismiss someone who supposedly meant something to them, or to allow that I never meant anything at all. This is the same way that people decide to believe one thing, thus uniting them and inoculating them from the masses and often from reason itself.
It raises the question: what are the other relationships in our lives based on? What is the subjective fulcrum upon which that connection can pivot upon in an instant? I mean to have a life in which my relationships aren’t keyed to a fulcrum. Deep lasting friendships are about roots and connections. When I first joined Facebook I felt like the interface was going to help me deepen those connections. Instead it exposed how so many relationships beyond my individual ones are based on a fulcrum. That pivot point is different for everyone, but we all have relationships that are based on something and in the social media age we gather more and more of them and we can sever more and more of them easily.
I don’t know what that says about the state of real lasting friendships, but I suspect that those connections can’t really exist over the internet, because what happens to them when service goes down?