If you’ve ever broken up with someone or been broken up with, you are familiar with how rough it feels. The added challenge of living in a world where digital connections can persist can make breakups even trickier to navigate.
Social media allows us to continue seeing updates from people’s lives from afar long after we’ve stopped maintaining our connections in real life. It feeds into a desire to stay connected and makes it harder to achieve closure. Our peripheral glances at our exes’ lives feed an increasingly vestigial appendage in our minds.
I remember one breakup where my digital connections kept my former fling in my periphery for half of a bachelor’s degree (!!). This is a nauseating amount of time, and I0/10 don’t recommend. Even worse, it wasn’t even a relationship. It was a situationship, where “What are we?” remains vaguely unanswered. A situationship often results in a yearning limbo where both lovers share romantic moments, emotional vulnerabilities, and a lot of time thinking about each other—but without the commitment of a relationship or a seasonal fling.
One takeaway I’ll share from this experience is to never argue or have a heart-to-heart discussion via texting. A big part of our breakup happened over Messenger, and the lack of nonverbal cues made it easy to miss half the communication and get distracted rather than saying what was really meant. You can get stuck rereading a text until your eyes strain and the words look meaningless, as opposed to remembering the emotional beats of a verbal conversation.
After our situationship ended, I saw my past paramour viewing my Instagram Stories. He was at the top of my views list during our dalliance and for months afterwards. I only saw his Stories once every couple of months until they stopped. For me, it seemed that only meant he was inactive—until I saw our mutual friend re-post a tagged Story of them at a concert. I inferred this because he’d hidden his sparse Stories from me, yet he still viewed mine. What did this mean?! This new data for our now-parasocial relationship illuminated a dim bulb of false hope within me for months, thinking there might be a chance of us reconciling.
I spent all my decision-making faculties weighing whether to keep following him. I hated that such an inconsequential choice took up so much mindspace. The prolonged connection allowed the ghost of our situationship to live on. I ended up unfollowing him only to re-follow days later, multiple times. Here was a social transaction for me to overthink without enough context to ever know if I understood the truth. If he saw my flip-flop following, what would he make of it?
Our digital connections are full of contradictions.
One irony of breaking up in the digital age is that there is too much minute information to process, but also not enough info about each interaction to get any certain conclusion.
Attention spans are shorter and hungrier for content to consume, yet everything forgotten after the news cycle is stored forever. We befriend, follow, or add people and never speak to them again after we leave, but we keep up with their lives in a way that people from previous decades never could. The temptation is strong to keep an ex-partner in your periphery for years and makes it harder to let them go. I wondered if our mutuals noticed the absence of us walking in the same digital footprints.
Ironically, our perpetual loop of eyeing each other from a distance was broken when we met in person. My friend hosted a party and accidentally invited him by clicking “Select All” on a list of Facebook friends. When he showed up, I asked about his life and if he wanted to at least be friends. He said no. Oddly, I felt relieved; even if there was no future, there was closure.
After that, I unfollowed for real. His account was private now. Once I was out, there’d be no way back. It was an unclean cut; I didn’t remove him as a follower (that was too big a band-aid rip for me). He kept watching my Stories until, finally, he unfollowed me. I felt momentary grief that we weren’t haunting each other anymore, but it gave way to peace that that was one less question to worry about.
Closure is like a diving board; jumping off and letting yourself fall seems scary, but it feels liberating after you land. When digital connections make it hard to get closure, you must initiate it yourself.
