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How do you compare yourself with one of the most famous women in the world?
Ms. Crouse is a senior staff editor in Opinion.
I was eating bodega grapes at my desk on a recent Monday morning, gearing up to wrangle my inbox, when my phone started buzzing:
“Check Facebook.”
“Check Twitter.”
“Are you OK?”
It was an emergency: My ex-boyfriend, I learned, had a new girlfriend.
Lady Gaga.
“Lolol” if you want. (Everyone I know did.)
But it was true. While I’d been watching the Super Bowl on television in New York, they were snuggling in her private box at the Hard Rock Stadium at Miami Gardens. There were the paparazzi as he escorted her away, her pink hair flowing and sequins pasted around her eyes.
Page Six produced a deep dive into Lady Gaga’s new “mystery man.” Refinery29 announced that Gaga was “wearing 2020’s hottest new accessory: a normal boyfriend.” The story appeared in the Daily Mail, and Business Insider and People, where my mother read about the couple after checking the magazine out from our local library.
I dated this normal, mystery man for seven years. Our relationship lasted all of college, and then a few years more. (A popular song from back then described being “caught in a bad romance.”)
As you can guess from the fact that you’ve probably never heard of me, I’m not famous.
So suddenly it’s like I’m star-gawking by proxy (yes I know there’s another word for that). But there’s almost no way to avoid it.
Social media in 2020 is so ingrained that it’s no longer a supplement or even an addiction. It’s just an accelerated extension of the way humans have always behaved. We live in a culture of constant updates. You want to unsubscribe? Well, you can’t.
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