Remember when people used to send family letters at Christmas? They would arrive all smug in their long envelopes impossible to ignore among the other regular sized cards. 365 days crammed into one 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper. You wanted to flick them into the trash upon arrival, but like any good tragedy, you couldn’t seem to help yourself from looking. The year was, of course, only full of perfect moments. The children were future NHL or NFL stars with Rhodes scholarship worthy grades. Vacations were in exotic destinations. New jobs were dreamy and rewarding. Life was perfect, perfect, perfect. I would read these letters and shake my head because I was certain that the future Rhodes scholar had a propensity for pulling legs off of spiders, that the next Wayne Gretzky had been lost for hours while the parents were gulping Mai Tai’s poolside during their vacation, and that the fulfilling new job was pretty much the same as working for Satan. Ok, so maybe I didn’t know these things to be fact, but I certainly knew there was way more to the story than this piece of paper was letting on. Eventually, people stopped sending these letters. I’m not sure of the reasons, but I imagine that there was just too much awesomeness happening and the task of writing all of it down became far too exhausting. I for one, was just fine with this. I didn’t need all this smugness in my life……………..

And then social media arrived on my door step. The new Christmas Letter. Sent every day, every hour, every minute. It was the Christmas letter on steroids. Before I go on with my rant, know that I am fully aware that I am guilty of just about every last thing I’m about to mention. Ok, back to my rant….. Not only are we posting about every perfect moment in our life, our definition of perfect has expanded to include what we ate for breakfast, the workout we just did, the shoes we just bought (by the way, don’t stop posting shoes, I love shoes..), second by second coverage of our child’s accomplishments. But wait, there’s more!! Not only do we need to write about these things, we’re inclined to include pictures, because you REALLY need to SEE the flourless, egg less, gluten free, organic, grass-fed, wild caught, paleo, whole food, non-GMO, thingy I just made (forget the fact that I ate a whole sleeve of thin mint Girl Scout cookies while I was cooking), and then you need to see me eating it (selfie!)… “Yummm, so good and the kids and hubs loved it (no one got past the first bite)” and then you need to see my dirty dish that I made with upcycled materials and then “oh here’s my new dishwasher, look how shiny the inside is, did you know you can clean your dishwasher with Tang?” On and on and on we go.

Detail after detail, day after day. Familiarity breeding contempt. The thing is, I don’t think we were ever meant to have all of this insight into each other’s daily lives. Relationships are built on the give and take of real moments. Stories doled out over time laced with honesty and vulnerability to a few trusted friends. Instead, social media has led us to feel obligated to share, share, share. Every post carefully considered and weighed because our 473 Facebook “friends” include our ex-boyfriend ( I can’t possibly let him see this picture of me where you can see the wrinkles around my eyes. Yep, I have plenty of those), your high-school nemesis that has now risen to mother of the year status ( She can’t know that I left church on Christmas Eve without my son. Yep, this happened.) and your child’s teacher (she needs to see that we are reading, reading, reading at our house, when in fact we watched TV for 6 hours straight in our pajamas and ate chips for dinner ( Gasp!!! Also true. Oh, yeah, please don’t tell let that mother of the year know about this).

We are unfriending each other (whatever that means), hiding people’s feeds because we can’t take it anymore, we are refusing to look, refraining from commenting, growing weary of one another. Look at what we have become. By our own hand, we are killing our relationships. We need to stop. Because I really, really, really don’t want to NOT like you. Don’t make it come to that.