36 October 2019_Esquire
I usually reach out
if [fake news is]
super fake. You can
take it offline so
that people don’t feel
embarrassed.INTERNETSHOW TO BE NICE
ONLINE
HANDLE COWORKERS ON TINDER AND RELATIVES
ON FACEBOOK WITH ADVICE FROM JOSH
GONDELMAN, THE INTERNET’S NICEST GUYmantic partners. Men and women have told me that,
for exes, they went down wormholes of anime ac-
counts, pro wrestling, experimental instrumental
music, and “new-age chakra shit.” The last one was
from my friend Harris, who explains, “To date in
Brooklyn, you have to learn about tarot.”
So why not just unfollow those anime or wrestling
or “new-age chakra shit” accounts when your rela-
tionship ends? Why subject yourself to those pain-
ful reminders when you could give yourself a clean
slate by removing them, and your exes, and your exes’
friends, from your feed? I’m certainly not opposed
to that, especially when you never liked the worm-
hole to begin with. I learned all about the Manning
family of football fame for my high school crush, and
when we graduated, I was very happy to stop pre-
tending to care about Peyton Manning’s career and
about the concept of football in general.
But I still love a lot of the things I learned about
through old romantic interests. I became interested
in Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell for a guy, and those
women are now hugely important to me. Patti’s Just
Kids showed me it was possible to be a young, broke
idiot making art in New York. I listened to Joni’s travel
album Hejira too many times and quit my job to drive
around the country. (I’m fine.) It’s lame that I didn’t
like these women until I had a crush on a man who
did, but at this point I don’t remotely associate them
with him. As a friend told me, “[My ex] got me into
biking, and even though I wish he were dead, biking
and its community have changed my life.”
And frankly, the idea of a “clean slate” is a fallacy—
you can’t shoot people into space once you’re done
with them, and you can’t magically erase them from
your brain. Pretending that people you used to kiss
just don’t exist anymore won’t change the fact that
they had an effect on your life, so I don’t even try. (I
am friends with most men I’ve ever been iNvOlvEd
WiTh, which I consider healthy and cool but which
many people consider strange and concerning and
which I might be five years away from realizing is ex-
tremely self-sabotaging.)
Ultimately, I don’t necessarily mind falling down
wormholes and picking up interests from exes. You
have to learn about stuff somehow, and your mom
and your friends can only recommend so much. It’s
hot when people are passionate about things, when
they can talk to you about those things and teach you
about them. And if your relationship ends, it doesn’t
mean you lose the right to care about, say, the Fast
and the Furious movies or the article about the goat
trapped on a roof who respects only one man.
I ran a poll on Twitter, in fact, asking what I should
do about all the BMX accounts I followed: Should I
unfollow them, forget about BMX via concussion,
start dating a new BMXer, or start BMXing myself?
I’d been thinking about that last option for a while—
learning to at least bunny hop or maybe skateboard,
because watching so many men grinding and bonk-
ing their pegs on various ledges and poles had in-
spired me to be more adventurous with my body on
simple machines, less of a physical coward. Twitter
wanted me to BMX.
As a result of his viral Twitter pep talks, in which
he offers compliments to strangers, Josh Gondel-
man, a writer on Desus & Mero, has earned a reputa-
tion as one of the most genuinely kind people on the
Internet. He just published Nice Try: Stories of Best
Intentions and Mixed Results, a collection of touching
essays about the ups and downs of trying to do right
by others. We sought Gondelman’s advice on how to
stay afloat when...You stumble across a colleague on a dating app.
I would swipe right, then say, “lol see you at work!”You’re scrolling six months back in someone’s
Instagram posts and you accidentally like one.
Here’s my move (I don’t know if this is nice—it’s more
ass-covering): I will then, from that point, scroll for-
ward toward the present and sporadically double-tap.
It’s more understandable if it’s someone you just met
and just followed on Instagram, like, “Oh, cool! This is
what they’ve been up to the last six months.”Someone shares fake news.
I usually reach out if it’s super fake. You can take it
offline so that people don’t feel embarrassed. I think
that’s actually nonconfrontational, and I would want
that too. You’d want someone to say, “Oh, that’s a
hoax!” That’s maybe a little awkward to tell some-
one, but you don’t want to hang them out to dry.
—As told to Adrienne Westenfeld