My Mini-Feed Says My Heart Is Broken: Navigating Break-Ups in Our Online Age

B.B. NICHOLS IS NOW SINGLE. [INSERT BROKEN HEARTH ICON]. – You could spend your entire life in this city and never see the same person twice, but when there is someone you are trying to avoid it can feel like they are lurking behind every corner. Fortunately the city is truly immense enough to swallow any and every person you never hope to see again if you are prudent about the parts of town and bars you frequent, but no matter how big the city, and the world are, there is no where in the universe large enough to keep our exes at bay.

I can’t imagine this was always the case. I’m sure back a few generations our grandfathers and fathers who returned from wars, recipients of ‘Dear John’ letters, almost never had to lay eyes on their impatient sweethearts again. And what about even further back? Lovers in mythology or Shakespeare were lucky enough to almost always meet with death rather than suffer the agony of knowing day in and day out that their former paramour is betrothed to someone new.

These bitches were lucky. They lived before Myspace, Facebook, DList, Match, Chemistry, and all the other social networking and dating sites that exist to remind us not only who your true friends aren’t but that often the most glaring omissions from our ubiquitous rosters of friends are the ones we cared most deeply about. We live in an age where we can always be reached. So what happens when we want to be out of touch?

The damage a breakup can cause to our psyche varies as widely as the Richter scale. Avoiding a one night stand who merely shook our bed a little one night can be handled quite deftly with a polite reply to any online friend request, noncommittal answers to any further messages, and if necessary addition to our limited profile list. But the true earth-shakers, the ones who left our most prized possession, our heart, shattered on the floor are more difficult to as easily file away electronically.

These are the exes we wish we could simply delete. In the days of the floppy disk our hard drives would crash at the drop of a hat, immediately deleting all data we had stored, (which was usually what ever novel I was currently writing about a penguin or my high scores on the Oregon Trail), but nowadays with online storage, zip drives, and email archives, nothing is lost forever. The pictures in which you’re tagged together can be shorn from your profile, but will still lay dormant in the albums they were first posted on, no one changes their screen name anymore so blocking is the only option, and there is no telling when and where they will pop up on someone else’s page. Whether it’s a photo, a comment, a bumper sticker, zombie request, or any other ridiculous application dujour, it now seems impossible to escape them online.

This may sounds ridiculous since now a vast majority, especially gay people, date online, but is it ridiculous to think that you could leave an ex behind when you moved from city to city, from country to country? Because of the internet now the cute flight attendant you left in London can drop you a line anytime he’s in town for a layover, the summer intern you sent back to school last fall is now a graduate and is back to rekindle what you’d let smolder, and the even the high school sweetheart you’d thought would never remember has stories to share with you and all of your friends on your wall.

So how do we maintain our privacy, integrity, and most importantly, our sanity when our exes can so easily slip back into our online lives? Well the simplest way would be to delete ourselves from these sites. I know, I didn’t even believe myself as I wrote that. But if blocking, filtering, and ignoring don’t keep them away what option do we have? Our generation was known as the ‘me’ generation because of our reputed preoccupation with self, and though that seems to manifest itself in our endless lists of interests, favorites, quotes, posted items, videos, etc., we have also taken up a new mantle. The ‘millennials’ are now known to enact our vast network to help each other out and work better as a team than any other generation could even fathom. We use our online networks to organize relief for natural disaster victims, educate each other on political candidates, and encourage energy saving methods, just to name a few.

So it seems our exes are never going to be absent from our network of ‘friends’ online. They may be a painful part of our real and virtual past, but they remain all the same. We can choose to ignore as much as we like but when they push themselves back into our lives perhaps we merely have to accept their olive branch or seek out their ulterior motive before we move them to the trash bin again. After all, our predecessors have some lasting wisdom to provide, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” How much closer can they be, if we neglect to remove them from our ‘top friends’?