Roland has lived in Singapore for years.
His wife and children are here with him, but much of the rest of his life stretches across countries. Family and old friends are in the United States, Canada and Europe. University friends are scattered around Australia and elsewhere. His work takes him across Asia, where colleagues and business contacts come from Singapore, China, Japan, India, Vietnam and many other places.
Then there are the clubs and associations.
“My problem was never keeping in touch,” Roland says. “I have more ways to keep in touch than I know what to do with.”
LinkedIn works well for his professional life. Teams is part of work. WhatsApp covers everything from close friends to business contacts. Facebook still connects him with people he has known for years.
But none of them quite reflects how his life is actually organised.
“The people I play golf with are not necessarily the people I want seeing family things,” he says. “And somebody I know professionally might become a friend, but that doesn’t mean my whole personal life suddenly belongs in that relationship.”
His wife, Claire, sees the same thing from the other side.
“Sometimes Roland will show me something and say, ‘I’d like to share this, but I’m not sure where it belongs.’”
“Sometimes the people who might enjoy something are spread across different parts of your life,” Claire says. “You still want to be clear about who you’re sharing it with.”
Clozeu initially felt more complicated than Roland expected.
“You can’t always just add people and declare that this is now the group,” he says. “There’s agreement involved. Some decisions need people to participate. At first I thought, this is quite a lot of process.”
But once his different circles began taking shape, the reason became clearer.
His family behaves like a family.
His alumni circle is a non-hierarchical group of old university friends and graduates.
His golf club is different. Roland serves as treasurer, and the club has a committee, responsibilities and a structure that actually matters. A hierarchical group makes sense there in a way it would not among old classmates.
“The interesting part is that they don’t all have to look the same,” Roland says. “The structure can follow the real relationship.”
And the boundaries remain clear.
Something from a golf-club dinner can stay with the club. A family holiday can remain with family. A photograph from an alumni gathering can belong to that group. If Roland wants something to be seen only by particular people, he can choose that audience rather than treating every connection as interchangeable.
It has not made his life less complicated.
He still has the same family, the same job, the same professional relationships, the same old friends and the same responsibilities.
But the complexity now makes more sense.
“I realised I have a lot of different ‘ours’,” he says. “Our family. Our old university group. Our club. Our team. They’re all real, but they’re not the same ‘ours’.”
And then there is one space that is not “ours” at all.
Roland keeps things in My Space too.
Sometimes it is a photograph he does not want to share. Sometimes a note from a trip. Sometimes something he wants to come back to later without deciding who else should see it.
Claire laughs when he describes it.
“For someone who spends his whole day with people, he actually likes having somewhere that is just his.”
Roland agrees.
“Most of my life belongs somewhere with somebody,” he says. “Family, work, friends, clubs. It’s good to have places for all of those.”
He pauses.
“And it’s also good to have one place where I don’t have to be anything for anyone.”
For Roland, Clozeu did not give him another social network.
It gave the different parts of his life somewhere to belong.