“I'm getting divorced!”: why we went from hiding it in society to announcing it on social networks like celebrities

In one of her fun viral videos, the

influencer

RayoMcqueer explains that, within her group of friends, the “divorced attitude” consists of being “a talkative and enjoyable aunt.”

Although these words may offend anyone who sees a sexist stereotype behind them (the divorced woman as someone with little self-control), they can also be read as a reflection of a phenomenon that is no longer so recent: divorce, which according to statistics will be the fate of more Of half of the marriages celebrated this year in Spain, it is almost never perceived as a failure or a trauma;

rather, as a relief or as an opportunity to have fun again.

Of course, also as something that urgently needs to be communicated to friends and acquaintances.

The days when a divorce was something that was kept hidden or that was lived and worked out in privacy are long gone—at least for most people.

Times when it functioned as a literary theme (dissected in works such as the cynical novel

My Life as a Man

(1974), by Philip Roth, or the profound collection of poems

The Beauty of the Husband

(2003), by Anne Carson) but not as a topic of conversation if one of those affected was present.

Today divorce – or the breakup of a stable couple – is no longer a defeat, but rather a novelty that is announced with optimism, commented on and celebrated.

This uninhibited display of something

a priori

negative was exclusive, until recently, to

celebrities

, who depend so much on the image they project, but now it is also practiced by anonymous (ex)couples.

A way to naturalize something that, sooner or later, happens to many of us or one more step in the transformation of our lives, no matter how anonymous we are, into an entertaining broadcast on social networks in which only happiness fits?

More information

What changes after “yes, I want”?

Getting married after years of living together and separating shortly after

Listed companies are required to publish their results and any significant changes to their structures.

This information is called “relevant facts” and must be available to investors.

If the idea of ​​love as a market has become a cliché, it is, among many other things, because on networks we communicate our love life and its “relevant facts” with the same speed with which a multinational would announce the dismissal of its president.

And it's not strange: one of the things that model Essena O'Neill revealed when she uncovered some of the most frequent deceptions among

influencers

is that they gain followers (and money) much faster when they are in a relationship.

Consequently, this single Australian received dozens of proposals from other

influencers

to fake a relationship and share the benefits.

María Bernal, account director at a

social media

agency , explains that, indeed, recent relationships are attractive and a separation, on the contrary, can become a reputational crisis.

But things don't always work like that: “It depends a lot on what the profile of each creator is like.

There are profiles in which the main thing is other people's content and others that are more personal, like Mara Jiménez from @croquetamente who advocates against fatphobia and talks about issues that directly affect her.

She included her partner, so when that couple stopped appearing, many people asked her and she was forced to release a statement.

She did it well, because she allowed her followers to feel reflected.

In the end, managing these crises depends a lot on understanding what kind of empathy your community has for you.

If your content depends on you, of course it will affect you, but not necessarily in a negative way.

Transparency, stopping rumors, is always better than concealment.”

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“Recognizing a relationship or its end affects the brand image of many

influencers

and celebrities,” confirms Loola Pérez, sexologist and philosopher.

“Both the experience of love and its breakup are a mix between fantasy, market and vulnerability,” continues the therapist.

“We live in a society of very different speeds: there is a society anchored in the values ​​of romantic love, greatly reinforced by traditional culture;

another that demystifies love and is more aware that bonds are not created by magic;

and, of course, another part immersed in the logic of throwaway relationships, where not having a commitment or feeling towards a person can mean abuse or instrumentalization.”

Furthermore, the couple is something that we turn into a ritual through consumption and that is why capitalism—it is not necessary to cite Engels

' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

to demonstrate it—fits so well with it.

Of course, we live in contradictory times in which the economic system wants to cover everything (any value and its inverse), so the gears of social networks are also already prepared to extract value from divorces and separations.

“For example, I don't think marriage crisis rumors affect celebrity metrics, because most of them work as a product both together and separately.

On the contrary, they increase interest in them,” says Bernal.

'If it's ugly, post it'

Although the way we think about and experience love varies greatly between individuals, the way we communicate it is much more homogeneous and follows the same mimetic tendencies as the rest of the phenomena on the internet.

If Alessandro Baricco in

The Game

(Anagrama, 2019) wrote that all content uploaded to the network must be “aerodynamic” and Edgar Cabanas develops the idea of ​​a society dominated by imposed happiness in

Happycracia

(Paidós, 2018), both Intuitions are materialized in studies such as the one carried out by the writer and academic Donna Freitas, who during 2017 interviewed dozens of American university students.

The result was her essay

The Happiness Effect

, in which she stated that all those students “had a single concern, recurring and massively propagated through social networks: appearing happy.

And not simply happy, but very happy.

This omnipresent imperative affects all social categories.”

Since seven years on the Internet are almost equivalent to a geological era, currently

hashtags

such as

#nofilters, #nomakeup

or the BeReal application (record downloads in 2023) seem to question that dictatorship of perfection.

“The era in which everything seemed fantastic is beginning to be surpassed.

There is a demand for brutal authenticity and the figure of the almost divine

influencer

is becoming further and further away ;

“People have gotten tired and are looking for reality,” says Bernal.

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Today, disobeying “the imperative of happiness” has become a trend called

sadfishing

.

Sadfishing , in its worst form, consists of feigning pain or despondency to attract

the

attention of the audience, but it could also indicate that we are beginning to become aware that discouragement or bad times are part of life (and should be given virtual space).

Bernal believes that “collapsing is beginning to be seen well, but always within certain parameters and as long as it is through a voluntary video.”

And he adds: “The most important thing is that you choose to share that bad moment that, on many occasions, will be presented in a very careful way and can increase the empathy of your community.

Even brands adopt the tone of a natural person with virtues, but also weaknesses.”

So the wave of sincerity regarding breakups and divorces has exploded when we have finally left behind that unwritten rule that ordered, during the first years of the massive internet, “if it's

ugly

, don't post it.”

, don't upload it").

In any case, a communication policy as complex as the one we develop during a separation requires very varied impulses, and the anxiety to take advantage of any experience (even the most difficult ones) to reinforce our personal brand is another of the most powerful.

Regarding this permanent construction of the personal brand, Bernal is clear that it is a perverse loop: brands communicate as if they were people when they will never be your friends while individuals “work on our exposure to others as brands, taking everything type of strategic decisions and focus”, even if it is exhausting.

When love is not enough

In the essay

The End of the Love Novel

(Sexto Piso, 2022), the New York writer Vivian Gornick remembers that at the time she grew up (the 1940s and 1950s), “the whole world believed in love.” ”.

“So,” she Gornick writes, “we didn't know anyone who got divorced.

When Love and Marriage failed to take us to the promised land, sadness, fury, and confusion came.

We felt cheated: marriage not only failed to rescue you, but it became a true existential hell.

"There was nothing left to do but endure."

One of the axes of her book is the transformation of romantic love: from supposedly harmless dogma to myth in question;

and this, along with divorce, is an achievement of feminism.

“The demand for divorce has often been made by the feminist movement, understanding that this rupture has meant for many women greater autonomy and control over their life plans and emotional interests,” explains Loola Pérez.

However, many divorces continue to be a traumatic experience for some of the parties and, beyond the optimism (or calculated sadness) projected on the internet, Pérez advises considering it in a balanced way: “Breaking up a relationship is going through a new stage, there are changes. and opportunities.

There is the opportunity to get to know each other in a moment of pain (without falling into the romanticism of sadness or victimhood), to relive love in adulthood and with maturity (in a responsible way) or even to connect with the idea that you can be happy outside of a relationship.

But using the networks to check your attractiveness and raise your self-esteem does not mean that you are building a healthy self-esteem.”

Furthermore, a good part of the story we build on our networks falls apart in more intimate areas such as private conversations or, paradoxically, within forums in which we write under a pseudonym.

This is what happens in Forocoches, a masculinized, rude and violent space in which, however, one of the most successful threads (

When you see your ex for the first time

) compiles advice for dealing with a breakup and offers, to the extent As much as possible, support users who feel worse.

Surely, some of those users who anonymously recognize themselves as bankrupt will have taken advantage of their breakup to convey the idea that they know how to overcome difficult situations (that is what the much-cited “resilience” consists of, a quality also highly appreciated in work environments).

It is an inconsistency that is not only attributable to the ambivalence of the Internet, but also reveals "the difficulty of many adults to bond in a healthy way after a breakup or to go through grief with maturity," in the words of Pérez, who has treated many cases like this in your consultation.

But, ultimately, and beyond that distance between what we project and what we really feel, back to the most practical terrain the initial question resurfaces: Is it necessary for me to prepare a statement for my friends and followers if I get divorced?

Bernal responds: “It depends on how linked your personal life and your product are.

There are those who throw it at the first opportunity, assuming that they have

celebrity

status that they do not have.”

Or what is the same, if you do not sell any product and your followers do not ask you, it is better not to do it.