Should your spouse be your Facebook friend? Maybe not.
Jack, a new patient who has been married for eight years with two young sons, rails against Facebook: "Let's see: yesterday my wife:
- Felt bloated
- Realized she has nothing to wear
- Posted yet another adorable photo album of our boys dressed as Jedi warriors.
- Was missing Michael Jackson and, oh yeah...
- DID NOT HAVE SEX WITH ME!"
Fred complains that every time his wife posts something to her Superwall, he realizes just how boring their lives have become. "Do I really need to know that my wife is about to do something totally nutty like go have a second cappuccino? What happened to the wild woman I fell in love with?"
We've all heard the phrase "familiarity breeds contempt," but in this age of social networking, perhaps familiarity breeds something even worse: boredom. Being in a long-term relationship isn't easy. To do it well a couple must maintain a high degree of transparency and dependability. Connectivity helps us in that respect. At any given time, my wife can text me, email me, ping me, call me on the cell, try me on the home line, or sometimes just walk into the next room if she's feeling particularly energetic and say, "Hey, we need kale."
But while relationships require transparency and dependability, sexual attraction thrives on the opposite: unpredictability and mystery. Therein lies the relationship rub: how do we share everything with our partners and yet also remain mysterious and unpredictable?
We need to constantly cultivate a sense of newness and novelty in our relationships and defend vigilantly against forces that work against it: like your spouse's superwall. If you think back to those early days of your relationship and the first throes of romance, there was a time when you didn't know every little thing your partner was thinking or doing, when the pursuit of knowing each other drove you to new levels of desire and passion. Sure it may have been a little scary to wonder if the phone was going to ring, or if you'd like each other's friends, but it also was thrilling. A sense of separateness and "not knowing" is scary, but it's also essential to attraction. The conventional wisdom tells us that in relationships there should be no secrets, there should be nothing to hide, but if nothing is hidden, then what is there to seek? When you're in a long-term relationship, you don't need more information about your partner, you need less.
I recently went to the playground with my three-year old son, Beckett, and wacthed as he ran off on his own to explore and play - but not without looking back at the bench to make sure I was still there. If I do my job right as a parent, there will come a day when he won't need to look over his shoulder and check to see if I'm there. He'll be able to live his own life and just know that I'm there. Which is the same way I feel about my relationship with my wife. The more we trust each other to live our own lives the more there is to share with each other.
Which is why I'm not suggesting you deactivate your Facebook account. Far from it. Social networking is an amazing way to stay connected with friends old and new and maintain some of that much-needed separateness. A few minutes on Facebook allows us to briefly emerge from our merged lives. And we should be able to do that on our own, outside of the gaze of our partners.
So go ahead, unfriend your spouse. You might just gain a lover.