Facebook: Making Breakups More Painful

Today I was talking to K, a close friend, about how Facebook makes breakups even more devastating than they already are. There's nothing worse than already being heartbroken than to have 65 of your acquaintances bombard you with emails, texts, gchat messages and calls asking what happened. They're looking for answers about what went wrong when... OH YEAH, you're wondering the same thing. Read below for a truly passionate, heartfelt analysis of how Facebook really complicates an ended relationship even further.

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R has kindly allowed me to hijack her blog for a post about breaking up in the age of Facebook. Children of the early 80s such as myself (I’m actually 3 years older than Mr. Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg) are in the unique position of having experienced serious breakups in both the pre- and post- Facebook universe. Having just experienced an especially soul-crushing breakup, I’m here to explain why Facebook makes the entire experience a thousand times worse.

First, a brief word of background. We fell in love. We moved in together. We got engaged. We set a date, I bought a wedding dress. He ended it and threw me out. I moved back in with my parents. That about sums it up.

Background out of the way, let me launch into why Facebook makes this situation even more unbearable.

1) The Shame Quotient

In a pre-Facebook world, I grant you that a lot of people would have known that I was engaged. I would have told many of my friends about my wedding dress, as well as other details of my wedding and generally how happy and in love I was. But would 500 of my closest acquaintances, frenemies and ex-boyfriends have been privy to that information? Most definitely not. Part of me thanks God that the ex decided to drop this bomb before the Save the Dates went out, but really, would recalling those be any more shameful than changing my Facebook relationship status? Changing one’s relationship status is akin to saying to everyone you’ve ever met in your life, “Remember how I used to be really happy? Remember how I posted over and over that I was going to be with this person forever? Well I was really really wrong and stupid, ok?”

I will say that I have appreciated the outpouring of support from many members of my Facebook community in this difficult time in my life. But I can’t help but think of every frenemy and ex that I never bothered to de-Friend who must be experiencing no small amount of schadenfreude every time I post a comment expressing my sadness and pain. I could start de-Friending people, but they aren’t really the people that have wronged me, and I don’t actually know what they are thinking. So instead I just live with the shame of thinking about what they might be thinking every time I feel the urge to post.

2) The Ex Factor

Even if you do decide to start culling people to limit your shame, that brings you head to head with the second big issue of the Facebook age: de-Friending the ex. In the old days, once you’d moved out, paid the last utility bill, and had him mail all the stuff you forgot to pack, you had to make an active effort to keep him in your life. That’s not to say that plenty of drunken “why don’t you love me?!?!?” phone calls didn’t occur. But those calls did not give you the all-access pass into What He’s Doing Now You’re Gone that Facebook provides without any effort on your part. Especially when your ex, like mine, is an active user of not only Facebook, but also FourSquare. There’s nothing quite like signing into Facebook in your pajamas at 6:30pm to find out that your ex is currently enjoying a night out at one of the fanciest restaurants in your former hometown. Facebook and FourSquare allow you to bypass the pesky logistical and moral details of stalking someone and let you to launch straight into the crazy that results when you know more than you should about his life After. Before you know it you’re overwhelmed by questions of “how can he be over it so fast? Has he found someone else? DID I MEAN NOTHING?!?!?!”

So you decide that you don’t want to be Crazy Stalker Lady and that you should un-friend him. But now removing him entirely from your life, Facebook-style, has become as active an effort as keeping him in your life was pre-Facebook. Un-Friending forces you to confront all the tiny little breakup voices still lurking in your head. “But what if he posts that he really misses you right after you block him?” one voice might whisper. “Isn’t it better to know what he’s doing than to wonder?” another voice (posing as the voice of reason) might argue. To de-Friend requires a Herculean effort to shut out all the little voices, a task that is often beyond the recently dumped.

And if you have been together a long time (living together three years and friends before that for two more, for example), de-Friending him is only the tip of the iceberg. What about the hundreds of mutual friends that you share? Some are easily categorized as His, but most you don’t want to lose just because he dumped you. But as long as you are friends with them, there is a chance he will continue to infiltrate your Facebook world. And what about photos? In the old days, it was a simple matter of either shoving the photos in a box under your bed or making a little funeral pyre for them (depending on your flare for the dramatic). But now your photos represent Who You Are to the Facebook world. Deleting all the ones of you and him together, or you participating in things you did together, means essentially deleting the last 5 years of your life. You don’t want the world to think you just didn’t exist for most of your twenties, even if, looking back, you wish you had existed a little bit more without him. And if you aren’t going to delete the photos and you aren’t going to un-Friend mutual friends, unfriending him becomes essentially an exercise in futility.

I realize this post is going to out me as a crazy lady to many people, including many people who have no idea who I am. I think bad breakups make all of us a little crazy. I would appreciate any suggestions as to how to keep Facebook from making the little bit of crazy a little bit worse.