Mr. and Mrs. Perfect … Really? 

 

If you spend any time on social media, I know you have seen this family.

Mr. and Mrs. Perfect with their 2 perfect kids and their dog named Spot?

Their social media pages are filled with perfectly filtered selfies, photos of family game nights, date nights, car rides with family sing along’s and fun filled vacations. 

They each publicly boasts about how smoke’n hot, patient, unselfish and romantic the other is and how down right blessed they are to be married to their best friend.

And let’s not forgot their perfect children!

Suzie with her 4.0 GPA who devotes all her free time to feeding the hungry and clothing the poor and Timmy, who not only mentors young troubled boys in his church youth group, but is also the all star soccer player on his high school soccer team and is receiving a scholarship to PU (Perfect University)!

Oh, how we envy this couple with their perfect marriage … their perfect family … their perfect life.

Welcome to reality 

Okay, so maybe after 20 + years, your spouse is more lukewarm than smoke’n hot and your romantic evening consists of gourmet pizza and wine with a cork instead of a screw off top.

Your little Suzie couldn’t pass algebra if her life depended on it and views Beyonce as the most well rounded and inspirational person she knows. And your Timmy … he doesn’t know the difference between a soccer ball and a tennis ball and his biggest dilemma at the moment is whether to take mechanics 101 at tech after he graduates or follow his dream of becoming a professional gamer.

And those family car rides and vacations … yeah … let’s not even go there.

Here’s a thought … before you start comparing and beating yourself up over being less than Mr. and Mrs. Perfect, consider this…

Not everything you see on social media is always as perfect as it appears.

While I’m sure many families are exactly as they appear and many enjoy social media as a means to connect and socialize with family and friends, many, however, are using it as a way to fill a deep seeded need for attention.

Don’t get me wrong, I love being on Facebook! I have fun connecting with longtime friends, chatting and cutting up and, posting about fun evenings with friends and family.  And I will admit, I am very guilty of bragging on my food and family 98% of the time!  

However, as I spend more time on FB, I see more and more posts reflecting “perfect families” and very rarely seeing posts that reflected the day to day crap we all struggle with behind closed doors. Which I get, who wants to air their dirty laundry for the world to see? I sure don’t!!! 

(Well…some people do, but that’s for another post)

What our social media pages say about us

One night I was doing some inner reflection as to why I enjoy posting on social media. This lead me to researching social media behavior in hopes of finding out what people’s (including myself) online activity said about the type of people they were. In my search, I found this interesting article.

Psychologists at Brunel University London surveyed Facebook users to examine the personality traits and motives that influence the topics they choose to write about in their status updates – something that few previous studies have explored.
The data was collected from 555 Facebook users who completed online surveys measuring the ‘Big Five’ personality traits – extroversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness – as well as self-esteem and narcissism.

The research found:

* People with low self-esteem more frequently posted status updates about their current romantic partner.

 * Narcissists more frequently updated about their achievements, which was motivated by their need for attention and validation from the Facebook community. These updates also received a greater number of ‘likes’ and comments, indicating that narcissists’ boasting may be reinforced by the attention they crave.

* Narcissists also wrote more status updates about their diet and exercise routine, suggesting that they use Facebook to broadcast the effort they put into their physical appearance.

* Conscientiousness was associated with writing more updates about one’s children.

Interesting huh?

While I think FB and social media, in general, are wonderful tools for keeping in touch and communicating with friends and family, and many people who enjoy it are healthy and happy. I also feel it’s taken “keeping up with the Jones”  to a whole new level.  Now it’s just done in a more passive aggressive fashion. 

In addition to that, I feel it’s replacing physical and bonding relationships where we can be real and honest. 

I’m not saying that social media is bad or that everyone on it is fake. I’m simply saying to be mindful when seeing the “perfect” family and realize the grass isn’t always as greener on the other side. 

I think Robert Sorokanich sums it up pretty well…  

 “Facebook is a narcissistic playground where the best, the funniest, the most charming aspects of our lives are publicized and the shitty stuff, the boring stuff, the beige that is most of our daily grind almost never gets posted. All those walls are edited at some level and that makes them, at best, a deformed mirror image of real life or, at worst, nothing more than a fictional movie of how we want people to see us.”