I have a good friend who loves her husband but who also has serious problems in her marriage. The two don’t communicate well, or often, and complain about each other to everyone they know.

When those Facebook birthday and anniversary pages come up, they practically drown in declarations of perfect life and adulation for one another.

I think they do, in fact, love one another.

But they would never dream of being honest about their marriage and saying it was complicated and somewhat difficult, but had survived.

Knowing them, i see how useful it would be to people to see how they have overcome their troubles and stayed together. But nobody who reads their Facebook page will ever know.

I see this all the time, people using Facebook to project an image or idea or belief but I rarely see people talking about the real complexities of their lives, or their flaws, faults and shortcomings. Not in their carefully crafted pages and bios.

Successful people who are loving and fulfilled parade themselves across Facebook News Feeds all day long, and they are rewarded with countless new instant friends they don’t even need to ever meet or take out to dinner.

But are they the real people or just the masks? Social research suggests the latter.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see a Facebook post that read: “To my  husband and partner Jim, on our tenth wedding anniversary: I love you very much and I am grateful to your for struggling with me to resolve all of the complexities and challenges and sore spots of any marriage. I love you for that. We almost broke up 100 times, and sometimes i wish we still had. But that is the price of love.”

I would be eager to read that page.

A number of recent studies have found that people use social media like Facebook to present the best possible images and stories about themselves, Facebook is not about truth or authenticity.

People increasingly complain that they feel inferior just be reading other people’s musings about themselves.

“When my self-esteem is shaky,” wrote Jennifer Garam in Psychology Today,  “which it often is, I have to be careful around social media. On Facebook and Twitter, everything is always wonderful for everyone and all their lives are amazing. Except for the people who deliberately cultivate cynical, snarky social media personas, and to my shaky self-esteem self, even this is something to be envious of; I feel like an insecure middle schooler looking up the tough high school girl with dark eyeliner who smokes outside metal shop and does not care about anything, and like I could never be that cool.”

Here is a new a tool that not only permits but encourages people  to be false about their lives to their friends and anyone else on their feeds. On Facebook, we are all friends, and we all wish to message and connect with each other, even if we are not friends, even if we don’t even like each other.

As a writer, I have a different agenda, although I certainly try at times to put the best possible face on what I do.

But I am committed to the search for authenticity, and  a writer who is not authentic is useless, and will soon be obsolete. On social media, we have the tools to present ourselves as we would wish to be seen, not necessarily as we are.

That can’t work for me.

I subscribe to John Updike’s belief: A good writer sees the worst parts of himself and shares them with his or her readers. That is, in some ways, the point of writing, at least for me.

It is of absolutely no use to you or me if I only show you only a sweet and noble me.  If you choose to like me, how great. If you don’t, that’s life.

First, it would fall flat if I projected only love and goodness, and second, I would be useless to everyone. The very things people don’t like or relate to about me are the things we need to see and think about.

The very things many people want to talk to me about are the things that sometimes reflect my brokenness.

For me, there is  no point in distorting my life, certainly not any longer. At long last, I am learning to be true to myself. For me, life is not about avoiding challenges, it’s about overcoming them. It isn’t about being perfect, it’ about dealing with epidemic imperfection.

I can learn from that, and so can  you.

In our world there is great risk in being honest. Any stumble or mistake is magnified and  transmitted like a runaway virus across the Twittersphere. It is easy to be misunderstood, and there are countless people eager to do the misunderstanding. So we make ourselves the smallest possible targets.

If you think differently, or if you think at all, you will be almost instantly assaulted by the hornet people who trawl online for targets, and who hate anything that is different from them.

People understandably learn to be wary, guarded and thus,  false.  Athletes have always learned to never say anything real in an interview, and politicians are learning to be banal every day.

Speaking honestly, or even unconventionally, is often quickly punished by the legions of angry disconnected souls who live to pounce on other people behind the safety of their screens. To be different is to be evil, an enemy, one of “them.”

The point is not that I am good, or better than anyone else. Quite the opposite. If there is anything at all interesting about people like me, it is our faults and flaws and contradictions and delusions.

People are interested in truth, because it reflects themselves and their own very real lives, and it connects them to the troubles and darkness of life, which  are what people learn from.

It is hard to learn a lot – or anything –  from perfection and the careful marketing of self. Social media are, in many ways,  palaces of lies and deception.

Social media gives us the means to put a false mask on ourselves, and even believe it is true.

I don’t think I could present myself all that well any longer even if I wanted to, and if I tried, I would never get away with it.