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12/06/2009Breaking up in the time of Twitter

Breaking up in the time of Twitter Relationships and breakups are difficult under the best of conditions. Add email, blogs and social networking platforms to the mix and you get a virtual nightmare, our writer discovers.

Today’s technological advances make the already complicated territory of dating war games a minefield of miscommunication. Do I text? Do I email? Do I message via Facebook? If technology has complicated a once straightforward process, imagine what it’s done to one of the most intricate and complex of rituals: breaking up.

Because after two decide to pair up, the virtual interdependence starts and grows exponentially, organically, without one even really noticing it – until the relationship ends. And that is where the cyber nightmare begins.

As recently as 2002, getting rid of “ex ephemera” was relatively easy. The broken hearted could sift through tangible memorabilia such as photos, cards and CDs and toss them all into a box for safekeeping or even throw them out. But a mere seven years later, forget it – it is just not that simple anymore.

When I parted ways with my Ex, I didn’t just move to a different city, I traversed an ocean. But thousands of miles and a new continent don’t mean anything when your Ex’s name and activities can be seen and followed online without even trying.

So in the age of technology, how do you let go? How do you move on, when your Ex is virtually everywhere?


Transatlantic distance

My Ex and I were extremely cyber connected in the course of our three-year relationship: Gmail chat, Twitter, Flickr, shared items on Google Reader, Facebook, YouTube, links on our blogs and, finally, Skype.

As a result, our relationship became an intricate, tangled web of virtual cables that needed to be undone. But, as I would learn, they could only be disconnected slowly and painfully, and sometimes with lots of shock since most of the wires were still live.

My first foray into untangling (I was not yet into cutting) some of the wires was email. I asked early on in our “mutual” breakup that we keep email to a bare minimum, just for emergencies. Yet, three months into our post-breakup relationship, I wondered, ‘why is he still emailing me even though I’m not responding?’

I began forwarding all incoming mail from his various email addresses to one of my spam accounts. It’s a simple, commonly used practice that I was advised to do months before but didn’t because I thought I was stronger than everyone else. But in the end, I wasn’t. And I was tired of suffering from an anxiety attack every time I opened my Gmail account in fear (and admittedly, in hope) that he had contacted me. The discipline came in not checking the spam account. It took about a month to wean myself off that.

At times, I felt like I was dealing with Hydra, the nine-headed beast. When I cut off one form of communication, five new ways for him to get in touch with me surfaced. I cut off email but then messages started coming in via other portals.

“Making samosas” was a twitter message of his I happened upon a few days later, as I was about to enter my own witty tweet. Who is he making samosas with, I wondered. Why didn’t we ever make samosas together? I took a deep breath, paced back and forth, consulted with a few close friends and finally mustered up the strength to click “Remove From Twitter.”

But what about all those “mutual” friends on Twitter? These were becoming as big a problem as my Ex. I may no longer be following @ex-boyfriend but that didn’t mean I didn’t accidentally see @best-friend-of-Ex twittering “going skiing in Vermont with @ex-boyfriend and @new-girl-who-i-have-never-heard-of.” Can I remove his friends too? Is that in poor taste? Does that violate online etiquette?  But all I could think about  was that he is in the country skiing this weekend with his new girlfriend. Fuck me.


Remove. Remove. Remove. I know it’s me and my inability to deal with this break up, when @ex-boyfriend and his daily activities, are being mentioned at least three times a week in 140 characters or less. Yet severing post-breakup virtual circuits are more than a simple click of the mouse.

Coffee with a dash of Ex

Checking my blogs in the morning is one of the great pleasures of my day and Google Reader, a blog aggregator, makes it all the more enjoyable, allowing you to track your favorites. The best part about it is that it allows you to share feeds with friends and I did, of course, with my Ex. When we were together, I loved reading the blogs he shared.

And it’s not to say that I wasn’t happy to read the articles my Ex was sharing after we split up, it’s just that his name was staring at me every morning while I had my coffee. I really never, ever anticipated that it would be so difficult seeing his name all the time. At first I thought I was crazy but in fact I was going crazy.

In fact, it seems that in general, technology has brought us closer together in name only. The wires might connect us but the hardware divides us. And the software drives us mad in the process.

Virtual fixation

My Ex is a blog fiend. He shares at least 40 items a week on the feeds. When he shared an item at 2 a.m. on a Thursday, I wondered why he was out so late during the work week? Was he with his new girlfriend? When he posted something at 11 p.m. on a Friday, I would breathe a sigh of relief. He is a total nerd and staying in reading blogs on a Friday night. In post-breakup stress disorder, for whatever reason, one fixates on minute details.

But as smart as Google is (they designed Mail Goggles an application that forces you to do a math problem before sending out a potentially embarrassing drunken email), they did not anticipate the post-breakup shared-feed predicament: It is not simple to remove someone’s name from your shared feed column on Google Reader. Why is there only an option to ‘hide’ a friend under the settings?  I click the box and his name is no longer on my front page. Twenty-four hours later, however, Reader tells me that I have three shared items from my ‘hidden’ contact. I wonder who that could be?


One week later, I discover that to remove a friend from the shared feed column one must first remove them from your Gmail chat list. Not sure why I didn’t think about it before but then I never thought that Gmail’s miniature ‘do not disturb’ sign could unearth so much hostility. Afterward, I decide I should unsubscribe to his blog along with all the others he contributes to. While I’m at it, I should remove the link from my site to his in my blogroll.

It’s about separation, creating distance. All I want is a bit of distance!

In fact, I was suffocating online to the point where I had to shutdown my computer in order to breathe. What I really needed was a cyber-space suit and I was slowly building one, one “remove” click at a time. Unsubscribe from YouTube channel. Remove as contact from Flickr. Delete name from Skype contacts. Each click felt like more oxygen to my lungs.

Breaking up on Facebook

The fear of bumping into your Ex online is just as big as the fear of running into them on the street. They may live across town but, sooner or later, you’ll run into them at a friend of a friend of a friend’s birthday party or, in this case, on the mother of the online social beasts: Facebook.

At least Facebook has thought about the breakup scenario. You can discretely change your status from ‘in a relationship’ to ‘single’ without all of your friends reading about it in their news feed. They even designed an “I don’t want to hear about this person” column under settings. How long do you think it takes to add 71 “mutual” friends to that column? Hours. But I don’t need to see photos our “mutual” friends have taken of my Ex, out on the town, with other women, having the time of his life now that we’re no longer together.

So his name, along with several others, was added to the list. But this is an application, and it has glitches, and from time to time unwanted photos of him would pop up on my home page even when all I was doing was logging in to join the National Euchre League Group!


A virtual cut off

I don’t even remember how this all started. Maybe when I realized that we were still so connected yet so detached at the same time. I knew when he was eating dal or listening to This American Life but hadn’t spoken to him in six months. He was posting Paul Anka videos on my Facebook wall but was unaware of the biopsy I had done on my breast. It didn’t make any sense. This isn’t the kind of relationship I aspire to have, virtual or not.

I couldn’t do it all at once. How humiliating to de-friend someone you’ve been so close to in such a public setting. Was this wire necessary to cut? What will he and all our “mutual” friends think? Am I being immature? It’s Facebook, for crying out loud! I can’t believe I’m even tortured by this. But the internal debate was had and it lasted for a very long time until the small, light blue “remove as friend” link was clicked. And that was the end. Almost a full year after we officially broke up. I officially ended our relationship online.  

I am not sure how I let a bunch of ones and zeroes dictate my life for the past year. I thought technology was supposed to simplify our lives and yet, it only seems to complicate it. Breaking up has become twice as difficult in the age of Facebook. At least I can say that I came out of our online break-up stronger, my virtual muscles thoroughly flexed. Now if only there was weight in the ether.

Erin Laing / Expatica


2 reactions to this article

Gary posted: 2009-06-25 12:20:14

You, girl, are nuts.

Neil Warner posted: 2009-08-26 15:09:26

This article is right to the point...if you have someone in your online environment creating strong negative feelings in you, better to disengage!
What happens if the other person, your beloved other, is building an online wall of silence around you?
How do you realize that it's happening without blaming technology? and, more importantly, what kind of love is it? Read more at:
http://creativeconflicts.com/2009/07/passive-aggressive-using-techie-toys/

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2 reactions to this article

Gary posted: 2009-06-25 12:20:14

You, girl, are nuts.

Neil Warner posted: 2009-08-26 15:09:26

This article is right to the point...if you have someone in your online environment creating strong negative feelings in you, better to disengage!
What happens if the other person, your beloved other, is building an online wall of silence around you?
How do you realize that it's happening without blaming technology? and, more importantly, what kind of love is it? Read more at:
http://creativeconflicts.com/2009/07/passive-aggressive-using-techie-toys/

Add a comment
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