He two-timed me on Facebook. But our divorce will be for real
Georgina Hobbs-Meyer discovered her husband had had cyber sex. Now she has two warnings for users of social networking sites: your whole life can be exposed - and don't get dumped online
Georgina Hobbs-Meyer guardian.co.uk Saturday 31 January 2009
My mother emailed me last week to tell me she had joined Facebook. We don't chat on the phone; we email. Soon I expect she will want to poke me, write on my wall and, worse still, tag me in photographs of my wedding last May. Well, not if I can help it, mama. I love you too much to expose you to my online self.
You see, she doesn't yet know that I, her 24-year-old daughter, am about to divorce. She can't see my Facebook status, so why would she?
Mummy, how do I tell you I'm a Facebook divorcee? That the son-in-law you try so hard to like cheated on your only daughter using the social networking site you so adore? That your daughter learnt of her imminent divorce via Google Mail's free chatting facility, Gchat?
Prince Harry may know how I feel. Would he even have known that he was single again if Chelsy Davy hadn't flagged it up on Facebook? Her recently changed status cascaded through her friends' newsfeeds to inform all that she was no longer in a relationship. Snap went the trademark red heart, sending gossip rocketing offline and on to the printing presses, neatly bypassing Clarence House. Headline: "Chelsy Davy: A change of heart on Facebook."
Oh Prince Harry, yours is a state I know too well. You, me, all of us, we're helpless to defend ourselves once our partners rush to Facebook our misery over a thousand flickering screens. The sad truth is that, once you announce your relationship on Facebook, and for as long as you are linked to one another by html, your status - hell, your love life - is on show to all. Even though I've opted to delete my relationship status rather than modify it Chelsy-style (she, like my husband, distastefully rushed to invite comment on fresh singledom), people will see the photographs of my wedding and draw obvious conclusions.
Not that many people take relationship statuses to heart. Even if they should, they do not read "X is married to Y" and immediately write off the object of their affection as unobtainable. My divorce is proof of that.
It began with a woman he met at a party. But it was within the sticky web of Facebook where they really got to know each other, despite the photos of us and our "married to..." status. I know this because my husband once logged on to Facebook and foolishly left the room. I began to use his Mac, only to find myself blasted into the middle of a sizzling cyber romance.
And once I was in, I was hooked. Their lusty emails touched on bad Beat poetry, but were infused with textspeak, their coy cyberflirts rife with emoticons. It felt like I was stuck in a hyper-reality where Douglas Coupland wrote Danielle Steel novels. "Could this really be happening six months into my marriage?" I wanted to comment on my own Facebook wall.
And whatever Facebook was before that - a relatively innocuous way to keep up with friends, I suppose - it has since taken on a more demonic intent.
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