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| Home / College Guide / social media can make or break a relationship |
| Posted on Thursday, May 09 @ 00:00:07 PDT |
It’s weird how much you can know about someone who’s not in your life through social media.
I mean people back in the day only had a Facebook but before then, people would have to rely on high school reunions to connect with a person again.
You wouldn’t really know what a person was up to unless you were really adamant about staying in contact with them.
Social media was the solution for that. Social media also became the problem.
When I was in high school and made a group of friends, of course, I was still ignorant and innocent. I believed that the friends I made were always gonna be there. Texting, calling, and social media were going to help me stay in contact with them.
Of course the first summer was easy but then it got difficult.
The messages and calls stopped coming, we were too busy to catch up, and life happened.
It hurt to not be as close as I thought we would be. But what’s worse was that social media emphasized that hurt.
I’m not sure if you know what a “Finsta” is. But they were very popular around the time that my senior year in high school was over and all my friends had one. Finsta is basically a fake Instagram where only your friends follow it and you can post more personal things.
You can post things you wouldn’t normally post on a regular Instagram like ramblings, random selfies, etc.
One of my friends had a Finsta. I was really close to this friend and we would talk everywhere: Twitter DMs, Instagram, Messaging, and even YouTube when they had messaging for a little bit. It was just one of those friendships. But after high school, we would barely see each other.
On her Finsta, she posted that she was moving away to college in a week and she was trying to see as many of her friends as possible. She didn’t personally tell me when she was going away to college. She would post who she would hang out with and all the people she was close to. She would even do these trends where it’s like: Day 1 – Post your closest friends, Day 2 – Post the people you talk to most, and things like that. It was very hurtful to just watch because I was very close to her and yet she never posted or talked about me. She would post her close friends, her best friends, everything in those “trends” posts and I felt so left out.
And she never asked me to hang out. I would tell her we should hang out but I would never hear back from her. So to hear that she was hanging out with “everyone” before she left for college hurt.
I remember I was at camp with my cousin for the weekend and I would just stay up at night and see her Finsta posts and feel sad. I couldn’t stop looking at her Finsta because it would occupy my mind and it would just hurt.
Here’s this part of social media that’s supposed to help me keep in contact with my friend. But it ended up just being an avenue of hurt for me. I wish we only had high school reunions at that point because then I would still be under the delusion that we were close.
Looking back at that Finsta account now, she doesn’t use it anymore and it’s more so a reminder of that period, I can’t help feeling sad that I was kind of so consumed with this one page. It caused me so much pain. I’m glad to say that I am over all that pain and can look at that page without feeling the emotions I used to feel. But it still hurts to think about how affected I was by it.
This is one of the reasons that social media can be so detrimental to a friendship. We can be so focused on who our friends are hanging out with and who they’re close to now. It’s so easy to feel left out or hurt because you’re not as close to someone as you used to be.
It’s hard to move on from a relationship when their life is lived right in front of you.
That’s what makes social media so hard. Honestly, social media isn’t for the weak.
That’s why I think it’s important to stay off social media for a while if you feel that it’s becoming detrimental to you or your relationship with someone.
I know you have those pretty pictures you want to post and people you want to stay in touch with. But everything you can do on social media, you can also do without all that hurt. You can post the pictures and delete the app. You can message your friends on other apps. You don’t have to force yourself to be on social media, especially when your feelings are fragile.
As someone who was so hurt by posts a friend would put on their Finsta, I wish I could have muted her account earlier or even just uninstalled social media altogether or even confronted her about it (even though I hate confrontation). There are much better ways to confront the hurt of social media than becoming attuned to it.
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