“Dating After Divorce: How To Not Use Social Media,” is the title of a piece by “comedian” Juliet Jeske on the Huffington Post.
After two introductory paragraphs, Ms Jeske gets down to it with 10 points she recommends be followed. Then closes with this bit of wisdom.
You are bound to be slightly insane after a divorce, and you are better off not making matters worse by publicly pulling everyone else into your drama.
Nicely prescient, as I’ll discuss further in a moment. So much so, that I am not going to use her example as one to be followed by my own readers.
This isn’t so much because her list fails to provide anything new. That can be forgiven. Rather, because her writing strikes me as little more than an exploitive vehicle through which she is giving herself permission to indulge in so much of that which she claims to advocate against.
By her third sentences, she regrets having acted as she tells others they should not — “but not completely.” Why? you may ask. No need: Her run-on sentence goes on to say that she was “mad, extremely mad at my husband who had been…” blah, blah, blah.
All in service to what most assuredly justifies her perpetuating “I was 100% right and he was 100% wrong” story.
But wait! there’s more.
I had nine years of sacrifice and struggle to keep a relationship together that was ultimately a fraud at its core. The torrent of emotions was overdue and….
I don’t know if Juliet Jeske saw her Judgment of Divorce finalized last week, last year, or a decade ago. But what I see in her writing is a former wife who is still very enmeshed with, “hooked” into her former husband. And if her advice is on “dating after divorce,” her first advice should be to herself. She ain’t ready.
Perhaps the one thing she left off her list is the most important point to follow.
Using the Internet as a platform to dis your ex is a fool’s errand. It says more about the writer than anyone about which you may be writing. And taints the value of anything you may actually have of value to share.
