From The ‘Is This Satire?’ Files | Facebook Leads To Divorce, Excruciatingly Rubbish Articles In The Guardian

These days I find it quite hard to work out whether certain things I read on the internet are pisstakes or not. For instance, it took me longer than I care to share to conclude that Shane Skillz is most definitely taking the mickey, and I am still completely unsure as to whether Georgina Hobbs-Meyer, writing a piece in The Guardian about her husband’s cyber cheating on Facebook, has a wicked sense of humour, or whether she is simply incredibly tedious. I mean, really – WTF? My bullshit-dar used to be incredibly powerful. But the internet has made things confusing for me.

In the case of Georgina Hobbs-Meyer, please help me decide. IS THIS SATIRE?

My mother emailed me last week to tell me she had joined Facebook. We don’t chat on the phone; we email. Soon I expect she will want to poke me, write on my wall and, worse still, tag me in photographs of my wedding last May. Well, not if I can help it, mama. I love you too much to expose you to my online self.

You see, she doesn’t yet know that I, her 24-year-old daughter, am about to divorce. She can’t see my Facebook status, so why would she?

But of course. Of course you’d update your Facebook status to reflect your current marital woes before you’d confide in your parents. Do go on, Georgina.

Not that many people take relationship statuses to heart. Even if they should, they do not read “X is married to Y” and immediately write off the object of their affection as unobtainable. My divorce is proof of that.

It began with a woman he met at a party. But it was within the sticky web of Facebook where they really got to know each other, despite the photos of us and our “married to…” status. I know this because my husband once logged on to Facebook and foolishly left the room. I began to use his Mac, only to find myself blasted into the middle of a sizzling cyber romance.

And once I was in, I was hooked. Their lusty emails touched on bad Beat poetry, but were infused with textspeak, their coy cyberflirts rife with emoticons. It felt like I was stuck in a hyper-reality where Douglas Coupland wrote Danielle Steel novels. “Could this really be happening six months into my marriage?” I wanted to comment on my own Facebook wall.

No, really? Your first instinct was to comment on your own Facebook wall? Social networking sites: you’re doing it wrong!

After confronting her cyber-cheatin’ husband, Georgina requests a break, so her husband flies back to his “home country”.

I received a curt Facebook message from him a few months later asking to “book some Skype time”. This was serious. Skype, the videophone software that allows you to talk face to face to anyone in the world with an internet connection, was not used lightly between us. When we courted but lived in different countries, it was through Skype that we would have our most intimate conversations, eye to eye. Almost.

Playing cool, I demurred: “Just email your concerns.” But before he’d got a chance, we found ourselves on Google chat. Here is a transcript of the conversation: Me: “why cant u just email some of what u want to chat via skype?”

He: “i think we need to get divorced, and move on from this point in our life, I still love you, but our marriage has failed and needs to be over.”

The typing is appalling – but not unusually so.

Book some Skype time? Email me your concerns? Discussing your marriage in Google chat? Are these people real? I think I hate them! Or, if this is all a very clever way of poking fun at the Facebook generation of narcissists, I love them! But I think I hate them! This is all so confusing!

Also: I note that I find her husband’s “appalling” treatment of the English language during their Google chat far less offensive than Georgina’s – a woman who is an alleged writer, for god’s sake. Unless she’s referring to her own appalling language skills with that quip, and in a moment of empathy with her readers, has helpfully pointed out that this is not unusual for her, for lo! Behold what she has offered up to Guardian readers!

Is this an amazing example of over-sharing via newspaper? Is Georgina a comic genius? Should I cry a little for the state of mankind? Do let me know.

PS: I am sure Georgina is a wonderful woman with a heart of gold.

MORE: He two-timed me on Facebook. But our divorce will be for real