Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (12 page)

Luckily for us, our good friends Chris and Jennifer knew a local judge who agreed to legally marry us the following day just hours before my plane left for Jamaica. It was going to be difficult—I still had to finish packing, and I had a million things to wrap up at the office before I left the country, and work, for three weeks.

The following morning, I was at the office, racing around in last-minute meetings and tying up loose ends. I was right in the thick of everything to do with the presidential election, and I wanted to make sure it was all left in good shape.

Suddenly, my Outlook calendar flashed. A bell rang from my tinny computer speakers. And up popped a notification: “Invitation from Brent Tworetzky—GET MARRIED.”

I stared at it, dumbfounded for a moment. And then I burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of seeing something so profound appear in such an underwhelming way. Even though it made perfect sense for Brent to send me a calendar invite for our visit to the judge, I had great fun teasing him later about it.

So, technology isn’t always best suited for the more romantic moments in our lives. And sometimes Facebook just doesn’t cut it. A recent study by Dr. Sam Roberts at the University of Chester, in England, found that people were happier and laughed 50 percent more when they interacted with their friends in real life, versus on social networks. That’s a lot of jokes to be missing out on.

Brent and I, like most couples we know, can be guilty of technically spending time with each other but really spending time with the Internet. Evenings that we plan together at home often turn into evenings where we sit side by side on the sofa, both of us on our laptops, not actually speaking to each other at all. If relaxing from a busy day at work used to be something you did socially, it’s now a mostly solitary activity, consumed by mobile games, streaming videos, or online shopping—activities where you can physically be in the company of someone else, but mentally you’re all alone.

For our wedding in 2008, I had cake toppers that poked fun at how busy and focused we were in our careers at the time: a bride and a groom, both on their BlackBerry devices, looking in opposite directions. Brent said the cake toppers made him a bit sad, but I loved them, and eventually he decided they could stay. Five years later, our cake topper has become something of the status quo for relationships.

I hear a lot of couples talk about the iPad-in-the-bedroom conundrum. This is where a couple gets into bed at the end of a really long, exhausting day, and instead of actually talking or, ahem,
interacting,
both people just take out their tablets or phones and start surfing the web. In 2006, a study of 523 Italian couples by a team of psychologists found that couples who had a TV in their bedrooms had, on average, half as much sex every month as those who didn’t. Well, having a phone or tablet in the bedroom is the same thing, except with a few million more channels.

In a recent study by Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, 28 percent of women claimed that e-mail and the Internet were disrupting their love lives, with mobile devices particularly to blame.

Fingers crossed that the human race doesn’t end up going extinct just because we can’t find the self-restraint to stop playing Bejeweled Blitz. That would officially be the lamest ending ever.

Sharing Is Caring?

We all know “that couple” on Facebook. Constantly posting lovey-dovey photos, incessantly talking about how great their relationship is, writing daily status updates thanking God for the one and only love of their lives. I used to roll my eyes when I saw these posts. But then I got curious and wondered: What’s in it for these couples? What do they have to prove, and who are they proving it to? Is their relationship
actually
as good as the show they’re putting on?

A few years ago, one of my college friends proposed to his then-girlfriend in a very public proposal that played out moment by moment through Facebook photos and status updates. Although it was fun to feel like I was part of the moment, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was designed more to impress their friends online than it was for the actual couple. A few months later, they called off the wedding. It seems they had put so much attention into putting on a show of intimacy for everyone online that they forgot to actually have intimacy in real life.

Intimacy is more than just a beautiful photo or a well-written post, designed to get likes or retweets. Just because we’re putting on a good show doesn’t mean we’re actually investing in our relationships.

Whenever people talk to me about a situation like this, I urge them to have a discussion with their significant others and set some ground rules. In a truly intimate relationship, whether platonic or romantic, it’s important to be able to hang out “alone,” without inviting hundreds of people online to join you every single time. It doesn’t matter if the whole world knows you are friends, or dating, or attending cool events. The only thing that really matters is that you actually enjoy spending time together when the cameras aren’t rolling.

Brent and I have set up private online groups and accounts where we share moments between us about our son that are meaningful and special. These are things that we want to remember and preserve, but we don’t feel the need to share them with all our friends or the entire Internet. Instead of broadcasting, we’re narrowcasting. We get the benefits of sharing without the pressure of the peanut gallery.

And the simplest thing to do is to just have moments with your partner that you don’t document online. If you find yourself on a beach together at sunset, don’t invite the Internet into that moment. Even if a pod of baby dolphins surfaces before you, while the surf crashes softly onto the shore, let it go. Put the phone away. The world does not need another hashtagged sunset.

It’s wonderful to see couples enjoying beautiful, touching moments and sharing them online. I love seeing my friends happy, and I love seeing expressions of joy and love. But I always hope that same couple is making sure to enjoy an equal number of beautiful, touching moments that they choose to hold special and unique to just the two of them. It’s the intimacy you create when no one else is listening that matters most. And, in this age of social media and 24/7 connection, other people seem to be listening and watching an awful lot.

One more dimension of intimacy I want to talk about is what this means for long-distance relationships. As someone who had one, this is a topic I’m quite familiar with.

When I moved to California in 2005 and Brent stayed behind in New York, we talked online all the time on AOL Instant Messenger. We also spoke on the phone a lot. But we didn’t call every day, and our IM conversations weren’t scheduled events. We definitely communicated every day in one way or another, but sometimes that meant just swapping a quick e-mail over lunch or sharing grainy BlackBerry photos when we were out and about in the evenings.

A lot of this flies in the face of orthodoxy about long-distance relationships, that you ought to have a routine for communication and that the more you share the better. But this comes back to my opening point about the need for both attention and intimacy.

In a long-distance relationship, intimacy is usually the biggest potential casualty of the distance. And just throwing a lot of time or attention at the problem is not a substitute. You can’t just communicate more to compensate for the distance; in fact, that’s a surefire way to destroy intimacy. Because when we overshare, that’s when we make our interactions less meaningful.

A study released in April 2013 by Dr. Bernie Hogan of the Oxford Internet Institute tested the impact of multiple forms of communications on marital relationships. After examining how twelve thousand couples communicated with each other, Dr. Hogan found that those who used a greater number of media channels to communicate reported no increase in marital satisfaction, and in many cases, the stress and pressure of sharing so much actually put a strain on the relationships.

Brent and I went for a balance: we communicated regularly, but we never treated our communications as a replacement for more meaningful conversations and attention. And by giving each other more space and choice when it came to our daily exchanges, it meant that when we did have a proper phone catch-up every few days, we generally had more to share and looked forward to those moments with greater excitement.

Also, every time I heard that screen-door sound on AIM, my heart leaped into my throat. To this day, every time I hear a screen door open, I naturally assume something awesome is about to happen.

Intimacy is more than attention and goes way beyond just putting on a show. Know how to achieve a balance between the two, and know when to stop broadcasting. It sounds like simple advice, but in a time when we can share everything, knowing that we shouldn’t share everything may be the hardest advice of all to follow.

Love Means Never Having to De-tag a Photo

Partly because I worked at Facebook for so long, and partly because it’s just my nature, I am pretty comfortable living my life publicly. Brent, not quite as much. We’re constantly debating what I’m allowed and not allowed to post, especially when it comes to photos of our son. I’m definitely the “broadcaster” in our relationship. (Shocking, right?)

What matters, of course, is that we’re open and honest in our discussions with each other, and we work together to find a happy medium within both our comfort zones. Hyperconnected relationships can be hypercomplicated, and having candid, trusting conversations with your partner seems like a sensible way to avoid conflict.

The most important thing to do here is to understand what your shared goals are with technology.

This past year I went to three weddings. At one wedding, the guests were kindly instructed not to post any photos on Facebook. At another, the couple had ushers go around and collect people’s phones during the ceremony, surprisingly without having to use any force. And at the third wedding, they not only encouraged people to post photos, they assigned a hashtag to the ceremony and had signs up to encourage tweeting.

For the record, I had a great time at all three weddings, though after #mikeandnancyswedding, I was a little worried about what would be posted during the honeymoon. These were three very different weddings. Each of the couples clearly set out with a vision in mind of the role they wanted technology to play in their special day, and they achieved success in their different ways because of it.

Earlier this year, my team helped create one of the most interactive weddings ever, when Zuckerberg Media partnered with Condé Nast to produce
Brides Live Wedding
. Every single aspect of the wedding was voted on via social media, from the couples who uploaded videos of why they should win their dream wedding to the cake, the flowers, the dresses, the theme, the colors, etc. The final wedding was streamed live online and on Facebook, in professional television broadcast quality, to millions of people. This obviously took a couple who felt comfortable making their special day so public and ceding control of all decisions. But the event was beautiful and demonstrated how the Internet makes it possible for people to feel as if they are truly there experiencing an event, even from their living room halfway around the world.

For couples in the Facebook era, the same kinds of conversations need to take place about some of the more mundane but still tricky conventions of tech etiquette. “When is it okay to take and post a photo of us together?” “Is it okay if we share a profile photo?” “What if we’re making out in the photo?”

I’ll answer the last one right now: no. You’re welcome.

In all seriousness, though, differing opinions between partners about the level of acceptable online affection can cause serious offline tension. You should be open and communicative about what gets posted, whether you’re an overly lovey couple with lots of co-tagged photos and daily declarations of love on your wall or you’re against online displays of affection on principle.

It’s not rocket science, but it’s crazy how many couples never talk about this stuff. The more horror stories I hear, though, the more I’m convinced that being able to discuss and agree on a shared vision of online privacy might just be a basic sign of romantic compatibility these days.

Sometimes it’s more than just public displays of affection that get shared. Sometimes it’s the private ones. In the smartphone era, people aren’t just sharing more, they’re sharing more of
themselves
. I am, of course, referring to the phenomenon of sexting. Many adults (it’s not just the “kids”!) are sending each other pictures of their formerly private parts. “Dickpic” is a commonly used word now. Look it up in the Urban Dictionary if you don’t believe me.

Sexting is one of the riskiest online behaviors for couples. Obviously it’s not for everyone. But if you’re going to do it, you absolutely want to make sure that your partner has shared expectations of what you have planned. And be careful that you don’t tweet more than you intend to. If U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner couldn’t keep his namesake off the Internet when he (repeatedly) tweeted a picture of his “junk,” then it’s clearly pretty easy for anyone to make a huge mistake here. (Or not so huge, as it seems.)

To Thine Own Profile Be True

In the end, it all comes back to identity.

In the era of the broadcast relationship, our partners and potential partners can now get an incredible sense of our identities in an instant, and our identities combine with theirs to create a shared online identity. This dynamic definitely creates new complexities for our relationships. When people examine our online selves today, they can see things they don’t like about us, which may immediately have a negative impact on our relationships, and we don’t even get the opportunity to explain ourselves first. It’s difficult not to judge a book by its cover, and these days the story of one’s life has a cover filled with information and photos.

An online identity can also be an amazing way to help us find the people we really fit with and care about. Having a mutual understanding of each other’s authentic identities is the best way of finding the people we want to share the intimate moments with in our lives and who have similar expectations, interests, and values. Simply put, when you’re authentic—online and offline—that’s when you’re most likely to find a keeper.