I had already thought of writing about this, and then dismissed it as being not particularly important, when a series of entirely random conversations made me think that perhaps it is not that unimportant at all. This is the business of clicking Like on Facebook without giving any thought whatsoever to the significance of what you are really saying there.

This is not about politicians and middle-aged married men who get themselves into absurd situations by trawling Facebook and befriending even fictitious women, then clicking Like on the suggestive photographs they put up. No, this is about something else entirely: what it says about us, and what it communicates to the people involved, when we click Like on photographs that are representative of one or even two wrecked homes.  I had noticed this trend for incredible (and tasteless) tactlessness but pushed it to the back of my mind until some of the victims of this sort of mindless behaviour brought it up in conversation, and confirmed just how very stupid and hurtful it is.

I’ll give you one example.  A man leaves his wife and his young children, fails to pay any bills until even their utilities are cut off, and goes to live with another woman. He also puts her through hell in court because he is trying to prove that he was justified in leaving her and so doesn’t have to help her pay the bills. His wife and children are suffering enormously. One or two of those children are old enough to have access to Facebook. The girlfriend uses privacy settings on her Facebook profile, but when she uploads photographs of herself with the man whose home she helped wreck, she leaves them completely public, so that everyone, including his wife and daughters, can see them. They can also see the fact that people they thought were friends of the family, even siblings of their husband/father, are ‘Liking’ these photographs. They look at a particularly suggestive photograph, in which their husband’s/father’s girlfriend is wrapped up with him and wearing only a bra beneath a completely transparent top, and they see that their sister-in-law/aunt has clicked Like, that their/their mother’s supposed friends have clicked Like, that all sorts of randomly thoughtless people have clicked Like.  Some ‘Likers’ may do so out of spite, the very same spite which leads ‘current women’ to behave maliciously towards the women they have cheated by rubbing their noses in it with photographs of this nature. But some people ‘Like’ photographs of this nature because they haven’t paused for a second to understand what they signify - the destruction of a home and family – or that the members of that destroyed unit will be taking note of those who clicked Like, with great pain, and registering it as disloyalty and deliberate malice, even when it might be just unthinking stupidity.

Now I’ll just approach this argument from a different direction. We all know some people whose relationship happiness has been built on the misery of others, including that of the children involved. We can be pleased about their happiness because they are our friends and we might not care about the misery that has been caused to third parties including, yes, those children, who we may not even know. But we should at least have the imagination to understand that clicking Like on a photograph that symbolises not just the birth of a new relationship but also the death of another one, in whatever circumstances, is in very poor taste. It is in particularly poor taste when we know, or suspect, because of the failure to use privacy settings, so leaving the pictures on full public view, that they have been uploaded for the purpose of malicious provocation.  Why be a party to this and help relationship cheats cause pain to those they have cheated, by making your approval public too?

It goes beyond that, of course. Even when a subsequent relationship involved no cheating, when there was a hiatus between the break-up of one relationship and the commencement of another, it is still in very bad taste for those involved in the relationship (when they have children who find these things upsetting) to upload photographs and information that should, if one is sensible and not an incorrigible attention-seeker, be kept private, and not even ‘private on Facebook’, but proper private.  If people in new relationships with new children are incapable of containing themselves, then they should not receive any encouragement to carry on making a spectacle of that new relationship and its fresh progeny. Why? This is because it’s upsetting and disturbing to other, older children involved, and to the women and men who have been discarded.

I am not talking about the transient relationships of the very young here, but about relationships involving marriage, cohabitation and above all, children. If the individuals involved have no discretion and insist on behaving tastelessly and with no consideration for the feelings of the other people involved, don’t egg them on by ‘Liking’ their behaviour and their photographs, because you will be seen as having no discretion and very little taste, too. You might like or even love the people involved, but there is no need at all to click ‘Like’ on a photograph that, ultimately, symbolises an adulterous relationship and the excruciating pain it has caused to others. Like the people, by all means, but don’t ‘Like’ their pictures in public, on Facebook, because others are watching and are deeply hurt – which might, of course, be the intention of the individuals uploading those pictures in the first place.