Like Marie Kondo, I love mess.
Hearing about drama fuels me, so I recently asked the BuzzFeed Community to share some stories about how social media screwed up their relationships.
Here are some of the wildest responses I got:
1. "Not an official breakup, but several years ago, I was falling hard for a friend of mine. However, his Facebook page was full of a lot of racist, angry, ignorant crap, especially when Hillary Clinton was running for office."
"I know he wanted to date, but the vitriol I saw on his page made me know I couldn't be happy with him, and he had a lot of anger. He was really nice and funny in person but hateful, inflammatory, and ignorant online. The funny thing is he went on to marry a person from an immigrant family."
2. "My ex-husband reconnected with his old high school girlfriend on social media the year we had our first child."
"Given that I'm great friends with his other ex-girlfriend, and I'm not a jealous person, it didn't bother me at all. She knew who I was, and we were very much married with a 7-month-old. I didn't keep them from starting an online emotional sexting relationship. I didn't flip out when I found it all. I bought him a ticket one way on a Greyhound to her town and packed him a bag. Made sure it was by the door. Then posted about all their interactions on his profile with screenshots and tagged her. Told her he was on his way. I was too busy dealing with postpartum depression and being the sole breadwinner in the family to even want to deal with his bullshit."
3. "A friend broke up with her freelance journalist fiancé because of his bio on his agency's website."
"Other clients' bios listed work, hobbies, and personal bits such as 'Joanne lives in Wales with her husband and two dogs named Jack and Jill.' She was surprised when his bio ended to the effect of "His simple pleasures in life include traveling in his VW van, drinking with his brothers, and the smell of a bonfire on a cold winter night.
She asked why didn't he mention her? He forgot. Would he update his bio to include her? Sure thing. Days later, she had a look at his bio. It hadn't been updated. She asked about it. He forgot. Please update it. Sure thing. She checked days later. Same thing. Same question. Same response.
She asked her friends if she was wrong to let it bother her that much. We didn't think so, given how he mentioned his brothers. One friend joked that maybe he wanted to appear single. That got her investigating. Turns out he'd been cheating on her for years."
4. "This was back in the days of MySpace. He had me and this other girl in his Top 8 (if you guys even know what I am talking about). He also posted 'I love you' on both of our walls. The other girl and I talked, dumped him, and became really, really good friends!"
5. "I broke up with a guy I had been dating for about eight months over a Snapchat he sent out."
"At the time, my son was barely 2 years old, so I obviously care about any sort of exposure he has and the people I allow in his life. This guy had a long night out with his brother and a friend, which was fine since neither me nor my son was present. But at some point during the night, he sent out a Snapchat to multiple people, including some of my friends, of them doing lines of cocaine. I found out two weeks after the fact, and it obviously bothered me that he intentionally avoided sending to me/keeping that detail of the night from me. I couldn't get past it, so I broke things off with him."
6. "My cousin and her boyfriend were going to get married, but the pandemic postponed it. They decided to have a small ceremony in June 2021. A lot of family members couldn't attend, so sent a gift through her Amazon registry. Her registry was sold out, so we looked to see if he had one, and he did, full of baby stuff. My sister called her asking why she didn't tell anyone she was pregnant. She wasn't. But his side piece was."
7. "So it wasn't something HE posted, but something I posted that made me break up with my at-the-time boyfriend."
"I don't think it was the single deciding factor, but it was more like the straw that broke the camel's back. I had reposted a cute quote I saw on Facebook about how if a woman's crown is too big for her man to hold, she needs a man with bigger hands, not a smaller crown. It was about encouraging women to not make themselves less for their partners.
Well, apparently that struck a chord, because the next time I saw my boyfriend, he gave me the cold shoulder and silent treatment for the two-hour ride to our destination. When I finally pried out of him what was wrong, he told me that he hadn't liked that post I shared. It was honestly a sort of wake-up call for me, and I realized that I was too feminist for his traditional upbringing. Now I am very happily married to a man that never would ask me to pull gems from my crown to make it smaller!"
8. "He accidentally posted a photo of him on vacation in the DR when he told me he was going to Ecuador to take care of his sick stepfather."
"Yes, there was a whole other woman with him."
9. "I had been on and off with a guy for a few years, and it had always been long distance. We were getting serious, and he was talking about moving to my state, but something just didn't feel right."
"There was a girl I was always suspicious of, but he said they were just friends. Within minutes of making our relationship public, said girl messaged me and told me they had been dating since before he and I met. Oh, and he was also still married when he told me they had been separated for a year. No lie, this man was living a triple life."
10. "I was in an on-again/off-again long-distance relationship for a few years. I broke it off for good and blocked him everywhere after I found his real Facebook with his recent wedding pictures."
11. "This is actually a story of one of my aunts. She was married to my uncle who is my dad's brother, and it was almost like this perfect marriage. He had this one public Facebook account that had a ton of photos of his family and kids. One night, he got drunk with my dad and posted full-frontal nude images on said Facebook account."
"My aunt saw them, he deleted his account, and they split up. She would end up getting fired from her job because of the photos."
12. "I didn’t have social media, but my best friend followed him. We had been dating for four months at the time, and she sent me a screenshot of his newest post…It was a happy anniversary post. Of three months. With his other girlfriend that I didn’t know about."
"I broke up with him, immediately blocked him on everything, and cut him out of my life. The kicker: I sent her screenshots of our conversations and pictures of us together. I told her he was a cheating scumbag who wasn’t worth either of our times. She told me I was crazy, and she needed to continue to date him because she already bought him the Nintendo Switch he told me his dad got him. … It’s been two years, but I wonder if they’re still together."
13. "A few days after we broke up, he made a post about something nice he used to do for me, and it went viral. All the comments were like 'husband material' and stuff, so he showed them to me. Idk if he thought the comments would change my mind or what, but it definitely solidified my decision. Doing one nice thing doesn't negate years of emotional abuse."
14. "This was actually the cause for us NOT reconciling."
"Our marriage was extremely tumultuous, so when we separated, he wrote on my Facebook wall 'About time.' I deactivated my account after that.
I actually forgave him for that, and a few months later, we were talking about reconciling. Until my sister dropped some screenshots of him going on multiple tirades on different members of MY family members' pages about how 'crazy' I was right after he dropped that 'About time' on my page.
Let my crazy ass stay single then, sir."
15. "He posted pictures of a woman sitting on his lap, groping him, etc. while he was supposedly on a business trip."
And finally...
16. "My high school sweetheart. I was never really into social media, but one night, I was with some of my girlfriends, and they convinced me to download Facebook. The first thing I did after setting up my account and sending friend requests to the two girls I was with was look up my boyfriend."
"I scrolled down and clicked on one of the posts. It was a pair of underwear. My first reaction was violation because he was going through my underwear, and then posting them. I then scrolled down further and found pics of him straddling my mom, and posing together not like a girlfriend's mom and boyfriend should pose together. He was cutting off her thong with the caption: 'Haha, my girl gets it from her mom.' I then confronted them both. They confessed to the one-year affair. My boyfriend and I are now married with three kids. Let's just say it was not the last time they did something like this. I am thinking of a divorce, but my mother is paying my rent so she can sleep with my husband."
