Facebook is known worldwide for facilitating communication among friends, and for making it easier for people looking to expand their social networks to do so. But Neil Brady, a 39-year-old IT consultant, has apparently managed to find another use for it. His wife found out from the site that her husband had left her and asked for a divorce, which naturally came as a shock for the 35-year-old conference organizer.
The laconic message read “Neil Brady has ended his marriage to Emma Brady.” In addition to having to go through the pain of reading this note online, instead of receiving the news personally, the woman also had to read some of the comments posted on the announcement, some of which congratulated Neil for his decision and said that he “better off out of it.”
“The first I knew about it was when I received a phone call at work from my best friend, who lives in Denmark. She asked me if I was okay because of what Neil had put on Facebook: 'Neil Brady has ended his marriage to Emma Brady.' I was shell-shocked. I have had people who I haven't spoken to for years contacting me asking what is going on,” Emma Brady says.
“I only joined Facebook because the girls at work said it was good fun. What upset me the most was not the fact that Neil had written he had ended his marriage, but the comment from a girl in Canada who said: 'You are better off out of it.' It hurt me that he had been speaking to someone else about it,” she adds. However, she had the courage to wait until she got home, before confronting her husband.
“I asked Neil if he had anything to tell me and he simply said no. He acted like everything was fine, so we carried on as normal,” she reveals about the man's reaction.
Psychologists are concerned about this type of manifestations, saying that this is exactly the kind of thing they drew attention to when social networks began spreading. People are far more likely to avoid making hard decisions or face-to-face confrontations via the use of such means. And they're not only talking about social media websites, but instant messengers, cell phones and other such devices as well.
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