Why You Should Unfollow Your Ex...Immediately

I was sitting at a cafe with a friend the other day, lamenting about her recent break-up. It was a pretty significant relationship of 5 years; they lived together, had a dog, shared visions for a life together with children, family, the whole shebang.

And then it ended. The future they meticulously planned and the home and life they had created together died along with it.

Divorce or the ending of a relationship can feel like death in many ways. The loss of intimacy, union, partnership, shared hopes and visions, a life with someone, all of the sacred routines and inside jokes; gone. Even when a friendship remains, the relationship will never, and can never, be the same.

“I'm seeing him everywhere,” my friend’s quivering voice conveying the pain that lived just below the surface of her beautiful, composed smile.

She continued, now visibly restraining tears, “I saw on IG that he had a party at what was our house last night, with our friends, the same friends that I hosted for the past five years that would come offering casseroles and bottles of wine that I’d pour. Except now there’s a new girl living there. In one photo her back was turned so that all I could see was her long brown hair and if I didn’t know better, I would have thought that it was me. That was MY life.”

The voyeuristic degree of insight we’re privy to as a result of social media is unprecedented in the history of human relationships.

Before social media, we’d break up with someone, get divorced (barring situations with kids...those are another beast), move out and our access to what they were doing, the nuances and minutiae details of their daily lives would be limited to:

• (a) mutually choosing into contact;

• (b) running into them at a social gathering where we’d either likely know they’d attend by way of mutual friends or shared interests and thusly, have a choice in attendance;

• (c) pure serendipity (which, with any luck, would beget questions of introspection and healing).

In those moments of heartache where our minds wander to thoughts of our former love, we had the freedom to create stories, both self-preserving and distressing. Most importantly, we had the comfort in knowing that’s all they were...stories. Every day we’d make new memories, experiences growing the distance between our former life and new reality, and soon, we’d find ourselves healing. Just as with any loss, whether it’s death or divorce, we’d still have memories that we’d carry in our hearts, but after the waves of grief and the salve of time, new days would bring new joy.

NOW, instead of our minds safeguarding our psyche with stories and possibilities we contrive or diverting to something more emotionally productive, we can simply open an app and know exactly what they are doing, who they’re with- for better or worse, usually the latter.

Social media allows us to steep in heartbreak, carrying our past into our present for as long as we’ll permit. We get intimate glimpses into things that curtail healing and can keep us trapped in a state of emotional limbo, haunted by the ghosts of relationships past.

When going through my own divorce, a partnership of nearly a decade, I would sometimes torture myself with social media and remember my friend Jackie once putting it so perfectly to me:

“I don’t keep gobs and gobs of cookie dough in the fridge. You know why? Because I’ll eat the cookie dough. I know I will. And then, l will feel terrible.”

If you’re going through a separation, divorce, or heartbreak, I urge you: delete your ex from social media and exercise self-control with your engagement. Remove the temptation to go back, to reminisce, to dwell. Love yourself enough to turn the page on old chapters, embrace the present and begin writing a new one.

All is not lost; only what is known. This is just the beginning. It will get better.