He two-timed me on Facebook. But our divorce will be for real

My husband has a natural distrust of the internet and of sites like friends reunited and facebook in particular. He claims they assist in the break up of marriage, I always tell him that real people break up marriages not the internet. Recently though I have seen a darker side. Nothing to do with marriage break up per say, but more about manipulation of those on the periphery. Over the last couple of months the marriages of both my brothers have fallen apart (is it me I ask?) I am on facebook and so are both sisters in law. I have no axe to grind with either of them. They are the mother’s of  my nephews and neices, they are human beings and I believe it takes two to make both a good relationship and a bad one. But one sister in law in particular has begun to write status reports that seem intentioned to test out whether I support her or my brother and really that is not on.

Then I read this

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?

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.

Read the rest here, it certainly makes you think!