Local Couple Overshares Their Relationship On Internet
By Lisa White in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 14, 2013 8:40PM
In a world of constantly updating online content and the ability to overexpose people on the private details of your life, sometimes less can be more. Not everyone agrees with this concept, and certainly not Claire Meyer and Alan Linic.
The local couple (who only started dating this past March) recently opened a joint Twitter account called “We Fought About” that has been getting a lot of attention online.
The premise is simple; they tweet out simple reasons on what or why they had a fight. Sometimes a photo will pop up as well. They only post a tweet if the argument has already passed. Some of them are simple and funny (“Alan sent me an article that put Prince in a bad light.”) and some are justifiably infuriating to anyone that has been in a relationship (“I made a date with Claire and then double booked myself,” posted three days in a row.)
The couple are a bit bold in posting their more personal arguments, ones that reek of jealousy and insecurities that pop up in a relationship. Some of it even seems a bit uncomfortable to read, almost too voyeuristic in nature. And what happens if the couple ends up breaking up? Do you share the unraveling of a relationship with your Twitter feed? Just delete the whole account? It seems like an effigy we wouldn’t want the burden of dealing with if a relationship ended.
I see nothing wrong with intertwining parts of your relationship with social media, but at what point does the social media become too big of a role in your relationship? Personally, I met my long-term significant other through Twitter and share parts of my relationship online, but just the idea of a joint account or using my relationship as a social experiment makes me stop dead in my tracks.
The private personal details of a relationship, both good and bad, is something that helps you grow as a couple, especially during the first year of a relationship. I’d be embarrassed to have the things that troubled me at the age of 24 in the first year of any relationship floating around the Internet years later. People grow and change, both on their own and as a couple, and the the things that I argued about when I first started dating my better half is completely different four years later. Yes, the spats over silly or funny things are laughable, but I do not relish the idea of sharing and cringing over the petty things I’ve grown out of down the line. Many of us were born on the cusp so we just missed the oversharing of our embarrassing youth on the Internet. Thankful that we are able to breathe a sigh of relief that one day when you Google our name, a joint couple Twitter account and the press around it won’t pop up. Even in this digital day and age, some things might just be better left untweeted.