That’s Cringe
A series exploring everyone’s greatest fear: being embarrassed.
I’ve shared all sorts of humiliating, overly personal details online: about men I’ve slept with, illicit substances I’ve taken, and post-sex cleanup methods I’ve used. I’ve gotten yelled at online many, many times over, for everything from a story I wrote about the time I started a Wikipedia hoax about Amelia Bedelia to a smug, disingenuous hot take about how Stranger Things is sexist. (It isn’t, though I still maintain that it’s very boring and stupid.)
But the piece that makes me cringe the most, the one that sends me into paroxysms of shame whenever I think about it, is a column I wrote with the headline “Why I Want Donald and Melania’s Marriage.”
This was in May 2016, shortly before Trump accepted the Republican nomination and long before the media took him seriously as a candidate. At the time, I was engaged to my now-husband and thinking a lot about the institution of marriage and whether it was aligned with my feminist beliefs. I was also an editor, which meant it was my job to drive traffic. By writing about Donald and Melania’s marriage, I was engaging in two time-honored early-2010s internet traditions: saying shit for attention, and making everything about myself.
To be fair, my argument was more nuanced than the headline suggested. It was not so much that I admired the Trumps or aspired to be subservient the way Melania openly proclaimed herself to be. (“We know our roles. I don’t want him to change the diapers or put Barron to bed,” she told GQ at the time.) It was more that I respected the way they were pragmatic about the institution of marriage, viewing it less as an equitable emotional union and more as a means for furthering their own goals. “They are not two halves of the same whole, so much as they are two complementary pieces in a 1,200-piece jigsaw puzzle reproduction of an abstract expressionist painting,” I wrote then. The piece ends, horrifyingly, with me praising Melania for supporting her husband’s presidential ambitions regardless of her own aversion to the spotlight. “Whether your partner is running for President or debating whether to take a job in another city or going through a personal health crisis, this is a lesson that all spouses can take to heart,” I cheerily wrote, as if I were penning a 1950s marriage manual for megalomaniacs.
Whenever I read this essay, it feels like a giant thumb is descending from the heavens to press on a full-body bruise. I find myself marveling not just at how poorly it aged — though it did age quite poorly! — but also at how confidently I wrote about marriage and relationships despite knowing absolutely nothing about either. I have no idea what I had hoped to accomplish with it or whether I had any inkling that by writing positively about these two people, I was effectively laundering how awful they were. Maybe I didn’t know that Trump would win the election or what specific horrors his administration would bring — but I did know that he was racist and sexist and boorish and cruel and possibly a sex criminal. What part of me thought it was smart to frame that as a good thing?
I’ve spent most of my career waiting for “Why I Want Donald and Melania’s Marriage” to be dredged up from the annals of the internet and used as ammunition against me — by an angry trad-wife influencer, perhaps, or a 19-year-old trying to go viral with a thread about why I’m problematic. But no one has, and while I suppose I’m grateful for that, it also doesn’t really matter. The bad tweets, the regrettable takes, the explicit details about my sex life, the gas-station boner pills I’ve taken — none of the things that are part of my internet footprint are nearly as embarrassing to me as “Why I Want Donald and Melania’s Marriage.”
Still, I was never really sure why this was the case. Everyone with a quasi-public persona has done something stupid and embarrassing online. Why did this stupid and embarrassing thing haunt me more than any of the other ones? I needed to know how other people felt, if they, too, had that one story or post that loomed over them, a sword of Damocles of internet cringe.
Many of the people I spoke to said they were embarrassed by their silly behavior on social media. “I once posted a rhyming praise of Sarah Palin on Facebook,” one woman told me. “I don’t think it gets any worse than that.” Another said he regretted putting a safety pin in his Twitter display name after Trump won in 2016 to signify that his account was “a safe space.” “It was performative and meant nothing,” he said. “Strictly virtue signaling.”
Others, however, pointed to stories that no longer reflected their political views. In 2017, Marisa Kabas was trying to establish herself as a freelancer when she pitched a piece to Harper’s Bazaar about growing up as an American Jew and her discomfort with anti-Zionism within the feminist movement. “Looking back, I was grappling with big ideas,” she recalls. “Instead of just sitting with them and trying to work them out for myself, I wrote an article about it, which was a mistake.” The piece got a lot of backlash, which embarrassed Kabas but also led her to spend years reassessing her views on Zionism and Israel. She is now a progressive activist and a prominent politics reporter, and she often writes critical stories about Jewish American lobbying groups and the Israeli government.
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“It’s kind of hard to recognize the person who wrote that story,” she says. “But part of me is grateful it’s still online. It shows me it’s possible to expand your worldview, to talk to new people, to understand why you have been wrong in the past and try to make it right in the future.”
Miles Klee, a writer for Rolling Stone, told me about a lengthy Twitter thread he wrote in 2014. His parents had just learned about his open marriage, and they did not approve. In the thread, which is now deleted, Klee described feeling like he was being discriminated against by his parents and by the world, as if poly people were a marginalized group.
The thread was aggregated by Jezebel, which cast him as a self-righteous whiner defending his fuckboy lifestyle. It’s a perspective, he says, that he now kind of agrees with. He realizes now that “poly people are by no means a persecuted class,” he told me. “But at the time, the whole drama made me want to justify how I live my life.”
Klee’s views about polyamory have evolved a little since he posted that thread. But it’s the way that he now expresses himself online that has changed the most. Since then, he told me, “I have tried to avoid sounding open, earnest, or vulnerable in any way.” And while refraining from vulnerability is certainly one of the best ways to avoid humiliation on the internet, I’m not sure if it’s the best approach to life in general.
When I heard Klee say this, it made me sad. To me, earnestness is one of the most beautiful things about cringe, and it gets lost when we spend all of our time avoiding being perceived as such. There is something about cringe content that celebrates taking risks, slicing open the tenderest parts of ourselves and exposing them to the rest of the world in all their bloody, gloppy splendor. As annoying as that era of the internet was, I don’t think our cultural discourse has benefited from losing that vulnerability.
When I read through all of my old posts, from all the hot takes I no longer stand behind and the personal essays I wish I’d never published and the people I’ve written about whose feelings were hurt and didn’t deserve it, it’s hard for me to recognize the person I was. But it’s not just because I think that person was careless or had a bad opinion. It’s also because, in a way, I think she was braver.
I am now older and (somewhat) wiser, and I am much more selective about the opinions I share or the aspects of my personal life I put on the page. To some degree, this is a good thing; when we are more cautious about what we choose to share online, we are less likely to say something we will one day regret. But everyone will, and everyone does. As unpleasant as it may be to confront these old posts, they are like reading your old emails to an ex. The inside jokes that no longer mean anything, the raw display of emotions you no longer feel — all of these things are embarrassing and a little bit sad to read with the benefit of hindsight. But they’re also a testament to the fearlessness that comes with loving and being loved. I like knowing that documentation exists, even if I don’t enjoy looking at it.
You might think that I regret writing something as cringe as “Why I Want Donald and Melania’s Marriage.” But I don’t. It’s a testament to who I was at the time — someone who said things out loud just for the sake of hearing what the words sounded like. Part of me misses that person, but a larger part of me feels empathy for her. This is why, when I come across a stupid, poorly formed take from a Gen-Z TikToker or an anonymous stan account on X, my first instinct is no longer to reproach them, but to shrug and keep scrolling. They will learn, one way or another, that contrarianism does not constitute insight, that saying something loudly doesn’t mean saying it clearly, and that cataloguing the various ways the world has failed you does not make an argument. They will look back on their bad posts and cringe, just as I do. Hopefully, they’ll see the humor in their adolescent trolling, but also realize that the gift of youth is the courage to voice your bad takes. The gift of age is knowing better.
