Is there is a single woman out there who hasn’t Internet-stalked the Other Woman in the aftermath of discovering her partner’s betrayal?
What we find when we look her up can be gut-wrenching.
A glorious beach vacation.
A perfect gym-toned body.
An expensive and immaculately decorated home.
Accolades for her latest professional accomplishment.
A smile that glows with a happiness we will never know.
Eyes that glisten with a smug security we will never have.
It’s enough to make us feel inadequate about every single part of our lives.
But Warriors, we all know social media is bullshit.
I know this not from the Other Woman but from my own friends.
I have one friend whose social media feed shows off her incredibly svelte body, her handsome husband and her adorable kids. All of these things are a true part of her life. But the whole truth? Her daughter has been in and out of hospital since birth. She and her husband are struggling. Her svelte body is because of a bout of very serious illness.
I have an acquaintance who is phenomenally, insanely good-looking—like, magazine cover, walking-the-runway, not-quite-of-this-world gorgeous. Her feed is full of sunsets and inspirational quotes and photos of herself at various professional events in which her looks are dazzling. What doesn’t show up in her feed? She is a survivor of sexual abuse.
I also know someone who looks kind of awful in her social media feed. She looks older than her age. None of the photos she posts of the places she visits make them look particularly envy-inspiring. Is that her life? Nope. She’s just a crummy photographer. In person, she is sexy and beautiful. She has a magnetic energy that makes everyone want her attention and approval. She is in a relationship with a gorgeous man who is besotted with her. Her children are thriving. She is one of the happiest people I know.
Because I know of all this (in other words, because my friends are honest with me and I’m honest with them about what’s really happening off-line), I wasn’t thrown off-balance with pain or envy when I Internet-stalked the other woman. The photos of her looking beautiful, confident, fit and happy were suspiciously out-of-step with what little I knew about her family life, her professional situation, and her relationship history—and what any of us can infer about the kind of woman who wants to participate in an affair.
I’m grateful I knew these things about her, and about the false natural of social media, because once I saw that her feed was just a big lie, it became much, much easier to ignore it.
The truth is that we all have sadness and pain and insecurity in us, whether we choose to let it show online or not.
And honestly? If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that affair partners have way more pain and insecurity than most.
You are so right! His ow lost everything she held dear... her marriage ended because she just knew he was going to divorce me and marry her and then she lost her son to addiction and she lost my h because he chose to work on our marriage...as Elle has taught us all...she has nothing that I want to be like...absolutely nothing! Good post Chinook!
ReplyDeleteI might be a little different here ... but I would look to see if she was sad. Was she as devastated as my AOH when she cut off the affair? Did she really love him and they just couldn't be together because I found myself pregnant after DDay? I really wanted her to love him as much as he felt he loved her ... because otherwise, it just proved I was married to a fucking idiot.
ReplyDeleteI never got any of that. Life went on for her. She still posted about going out. She still posted about shopping. She still posted about ...
All the while I'm trying to desperately hold on to a man who was literally brought to his knees.
I still find myself looking as her life has turned into a train wreck. She sold most of her possesions - thank you FB Marketplace for giving me that visual of the couch they had sex on or an insight into how she is certainly NOT the frugal woman my AOH married. She's sold her house - again - thank you Realtor.com for giving me a glimpse into her home and its order where mine is shear chaos.
I am 23 days sober from social media stalking. My lurking account is set to delete on the 28th. I feel pretty good about the fact that I'm going to make it that far and perhaps the need to recreate another won't ever be needed.
"And honestly? If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that affair partners have way more pain and insecurity than most."
ReplyDeleteThank you! My OW is not beautiful or classy which made my WTF confusing at times. What she gave my husband was false validation on all his negative behaviors. What type of person consciously decides to turn lives upside down for years? A person not worth stalking!
I'll admit I am still bad about watching her on social media. But she doesn't post anything that is in any way interesting nor did she when we were friends on there. The reason I friended her was because I saw she friended my husband weeks before the affair. The day kicked my husband out she had posted on there that she had a new boyfriend, described my husband to a T. The next day when he came home she took it off. A few weeks after that she was back making plans to build a house with the guy she left to chase after my husband. They are no longer together either and when they broke up for good she had deleted her account for the weekend. She is very good at making herself the victim and then posting quotes on how to put things behind her. She recently had a baby. She never puts pictures of her on there only shots of her hand. My guess is that the baby's father is married. She is not beautiful or skinny. She's plain, a drinker and a smoker. So truthfully I have no idea why I keep looking. I noticed though that it's not like it was at the beginning where I had to constantly compare us, holding our picture up side by side. It's more of curiosity to see if she has changed in any of her behavior, but I always get the same answer, NO....
ReplyDeleteI am not sure if i should consider myself lucky or unlucky because i don't have any chance to stalk on the OW as she blocked me in all social media but i did met her quite often i the company.
ReplyDeleteAll i know is she is a good actor. She will be friend with a total stranger and told them about her past-how her ex husband dump her to earn trust from people and once people shared their secret to her, she will not kept the secret but to say bad behind their back. Scary huh?
I do hope that my ex-husband(to be) did not lost a diamond while busy collecting the stones.
Lost_AA
Lost_AA ... oh mine blocked me too ... both on her and her husband's page. It's easily remedied by creating a new persona. ;)
DeleteI am 2 days away from my new persona being deleted off of FB permanently. I've attempted to do it several times over the past year but I'm white knuckling it and am planning on meeting that 30 day sobriety!
I'm going to flip this dialogue a bit. Soon after D-day when I made the decision to give myself a year to make any major changes and give my husband a chance to get his life in order we started doing a lot of traveling. It was out of character for me to post so many photos of us in our travels but I desperately needed something concrete to look at to convince myself that life was good "out there" and that I could go on and do things instead of being paralyzed. It took me two years to finally slow down with that but it successfully kept up the illusion to everyone that I/we were great and living life to the fullest. It was so hard for me to do as I felt like a fraud and a liar. Nobody knew the pain I was in except my husband and best friend. The pain of those years has dwindled to almost nothing now and when those FB memories show up I am able to see the pain and now, also, the strength I had to make it though those dark years. Social media serves whatever purpose we want it to and as Dr. House always said, "Everyone lies." Those wretched OW have to post their own lies to make themselves seem happy and "normal" but they are not. Know this my friends. We all use social media for our own reasons. Love to all and may you have strength to not stalk those skunks who stink up our lives and world with their fake smiles. What kind of love story do you tell moving forward? "Hi, this is John. I knew he was married and carried on with him anyway. See what a wonderful person I am?, said nobody ever." (Probably screwed up the punctuation royally but you get my point.)
ReplyDeleteWow. I love this perspective! And I really love reading the line "The pain of those years has dwindled to almost nothing now..." What a hopeful thing to read. Thank you, Beach Girl.
DeleteSo true, Beach Girl! I read somewhere (possibly here) that social media can be a person’s highlight reel. And yes, we all use it for our own reasons. I don’t share anything too deep on FB but I did in the early days post messages directed at the OW in case she chose to stalk my page.
DeleteI think many people look “better” on social media than what their day to day reality is. If you looked at my page recently, you would have no clue what I was really dealing with. For the past several weeks, I’ve struggled heavily with a situation in my extended family that has had me in tears almost daily. No mention of that in my posts. My husband and I celebrated our anniversary over the weekend. I posted a picture of him at our anniversary lunch date, but I didn’t follow up with anything about how I drank three margaritas at lunch and broke out in tears when he made a bad joke. Or how we argued the whole way home and I felt physically and emotionally hungover for the entire next day. All you would see is smiling faces and anniversary wishes.
Things have settled down now and surprisingly the argument was another reminder for me of some personal work I need to do. But hey, I’m stubborn and fully aware of it. It was also a reminder that my marriage isn’t perfect and neither is my husband. We all make mistakes and his crappy joke wasn’t meant to hurt.
I am kind of laughing to myself about how an OW’s posts would read if they were honest. I’m sure I could go on and on on that topic, but I’ll leave that skunk in it’s own stink for now. ;-)
Beach Girl, Once again I was the same way. I felt exactly the same. It was what I needed at the time. And you are right no one would have guessed what was going on. I also lost about 20 pounds and did not need to lose any. So lots of positive comments since I looked so great now. What was I doing... .If only they knew... I stay off of social media now. I often think about posting more to keep a record and for out of town family and friends. But it all feels bad.
DeleteHmm, so many thoughts on social media and internet use. I know early on, I definitely went into detective mode and tried to find out what I could about her. She did not have much of an online presence. No pictures of her actual face, just a painfully self conscious side profile of her eye on LinkedIn. Enough to make me wonder "what are you hiding or hiding from?" and to notice I felt some relief at not being able to see and compare myself to a girl 15 years younger than me. And so I realized that I would gain nothing by trying to watch her online. And I found Elle's essential post on the OW and how she has nothing we want. Amen.
ReplyDeleteAs Beach Girl says above, social media can be anything we make it. We all filter and edit our stories, even in real life, even in the choices we make about who to tell or not tell what. Because not one is entitled to all of our stories but us. The dangers of social media are that is can become another form of self medication (like alcohol, like shopping, like binging on netflix etc. etc) even stalking the OW can give us a dopamine hit that keeps us coming back for more, if we are not careful. It can also keep us stuck in a place we don't want to stay. Example, I joined an online support group for misophonia. I have a mild form of this (that I now manage really well with mindfulness techniques). The more I read and interacted with that group, if found the more my condition was triggered in real life. Exposure was actually making it worse! and keeping me stuck. So I left that group. Not all support is like the community we get here.
On the other hand, I love it when facebook turfs up the memories from this day years past. I can see how I was doing, send my past self love and compassion, read the little bread crumb trail of love notes I left for myself in photos, inspirational quotes, pictures of my dogs and be proud of the work I was doing and how far I've come. I think, like Beach Girl, I recognize that the pain just isn't the same any more. Just a note, a memory of pain, rather than the recurrence of it. In the same way that I remember that childbirth was painful, but I can't call up the exact feeling of that pain from so long ago. I know it happened but it is long in the past.
And so, I fully agree with Chinook when she tells you that cyber stalking the OW is a waste of your time and that you should not believe the fake life she's posting. The OW is weaving a story she so desperately wants to be true, but deep down she knows it isn't. Deep down she knows she's shit. And that's tragic. Because maybe if she'd learned to value herself somewhere along the line, she would not have been open to doing something so shitty.
How funny that you talked about memories coming up on Facebook. I just got one that sent me into a trigger for a few hours. A few days after that post was DDay. I think you are all right when you say that they post their fake life. But it made me wonder if I posted fake shit too. One of her friends got on my Instagram page and posted under each picture of us together, "Pictures hide so much". In those pictures we were out hiking and enjoying each other's company trying to heal and we looked and were very happy spending time together. This woman had just left her h to be with the OW brother. Not only do the OW post lies so do their friends especially the ones that encourage their little union and try to protect themselves. I truly hope that the OW and her friends learn to value themselves so that their daughter's learn how to value and love themselves and not follow in their mother's foot steps.
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