This week, Katie Price announced on Twitter that she would be divorcing her third husband, a stripper and some-sort-of-model, Kieran Hayler. Price, formerly known as Jordan, also announced that her husband has been having an affair with her best friend, the married businesswoman Jane Pountney.
“Sorry to say me and kieran are divorcing him and my best friend jane pountney bee (sic) having a full blown sexual affair for 7 months,” she tweeted. Price is six months pregnant. It is, she informed her nearly two million followers, the “worse pain in the world”.
Pountney’s husband has a different take. As press, photographers and Price converged on his lawn, he insisted that the affair was a “drunken kiss”.
Price has lived out many chequered romances in the glare of the public spotlight, having been an early adopter of Twitter as a venting machine. In 2005, viewers clung to the love story developing between Peter Andre and Price in between kangaroo testicle cook-offs on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! In 2010, she married mixed-martial-arts fighter Alex Reid. They split after a year amid reports that tensions were high over Reid's predilection for dressing in women's clothes and referring to himself as Roxanne.
It’s all too easy for the snide among us to make fun of Price. Some may disapprove of her serial marriages, or have problems with her creative grammar. However, most people with a social-media account, be it on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, have fallen victim to their own oversharing.
This is a sad situation for Price, and a reminder that social media is not the best place for anyone, civilian or celebrity, to vent emotions or throw around premature accusations.
We’ve all been there: the passive-aggressive status update aimed at an ex, the heartbroken online meandering when the dog gets knocked down by a van.
If there is a lesson to be found as we sift through our own emotional rubble, it has nothing to do with falling in love too easily or with the wrong person. The lesson is about how loudly we should shout once the relationship has gone wrong.
When you stub your big toe, there is an urge to swear, to shout, to grab your foot and draw attention to how much pain you’re in. On social media, everyone knows your pain – and that pain and humiliation is echoed every time someone hits the “share” button.
