Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do (11 page)

This incessant documentation leads to a weird sense that the feelings that you felt four years ago for a person still exist in some dimension. The fact that life online has its own properties, its own immortality, its own weight or weightlessness . . . this can be comforting if our lives at home or with our families are not going the way we want them to and we want to distract ourselves from our real life—or our difficult off-line relationships—with whatever community we have established online. We can receive the stimulation and attention online that is lacking in our off-line lives. Some people even begin to create double lives and grow more distant from their real, everyday existences, and many have replaced the most important real-life, human-to-human interactions with online relationships. My clingy-turned-psychotic friend Tara? I was looking her up on Facebook recently (I like to confirm for myself every once in a while that she still lives in California) and I saw that she was posting photos of herself from a red carpet and tagging various celebrities. I thought to myself,
How could Tara have edged herself into that scene?
She’d never had a job as far as I knew and was the farthest thing from charismatic. Yet night after night, I watched her post glamorous photos (never with anyone, just of her) and write things like “My life is amazing right now! So blessed.” Confused but somewhat bored with my conundrum, I moved on. Maybe she’d changed? Two weeks later, I found out she had moved away from California and back in with her parents in New Jersey. It turns out it really isn’t hard to find a “step-and-repeat”
or red carpet and pretend it’s somewhere else with someone else. All it takes is @-ing someone and everyone just assumes you’re with them. It was a nice campaign she led for a while, but (at least in my mind) it ended abruptly and embarrassingly. Her double life was surely about pretending to others that she was leading a lavish, successful, and exciting life. But I think it was mostly about escaping from her own life and problems and living in a fantasy world. What better place to do so than social media, where you may be living a fantasy but the comments and reactions are “real.”

Over time, given the easy escape that our online accounts allow, we may begin to subconsciously choose to be distracted by them rather than working on the issues complicating our real lives. In this way, the delusion of an online connection hinders genuine off-line bonds.

While on vacation in Florida, I spent some time at the bar of my dad’s golf club working on this book and consuming Bloody Marys. Steve, one of the golf pros, asked me what I was writing. When I told him what it was about, an anxious excitement came over his face. “Facebook ended my marriage,” he said, most likely expecting me to react with surprise or shock. Of course, he didn’t know that he was the fortieth person who had told me the exact same thing—or that he was talking to the Queen of Social Media–Related Breakups (well, at least in New York City’s lesbian community).

Steve told me that his wife, Cindy, had opened a Facebook
account about a year before they got married. At first, he was concerned by how much she was using it, but his concerns weren’t serious enough for him to question their relationship. As time went on, however, her addiction became deeper. She would come home from work, go straight to the couch or desk without saying hello to him, and sign in to Facebook, where she would remain for the next five or six hours before going to bed. A year into their marriage, it was so bad that Steve felt like he was living with a Facebook zombie. He often found himself eating dinner alone and spent weekends out of the house while Cindy stayed inside, trolling the site. He was also doing all the household chores—making dinner, cleaning, and doing laundry. Finally, after couple’s therapy and numerous attempts at trying to get her to decrease her usage, Steve gave Cindy an ultimatum: it was Facebook or their marriage. She told him that of course she chose their marriage and deleted her Facebook account immediately. Two weeks later, he found her hiding in the garage, signed in to a new account that she had created using a different name. He filed for divorce the next day.

If Robin Dunbar is correct and we may only be able to handle 150 friendships, perhaps the more online friendships we cut out, the happier we’ll be. We’ll feel more in control of our lives and less deluded about the quality of our friendships. We will actually
know
the people we’re friends with and be able to manage these relationships.

So why can’t we just delete the people that we don’t want to hear from, the people we
don’t
want to be our
friends? For some, the action of unfriending someone is an even bigger affront than not calling a person back or rejecting them as a friend in real life. (Many people avoid doing the latter and just let friendships fade away, whereas clicking “unfriend” is an act of complete and outright rejection.) There are countless people whom I would love to unfriend on Facebook. There are a lot of friends I met during tennis camp, for instance, who truly have turned into some very strange people. I don’t want to see their feeds or wonder about when they chose to start a Wallflowers cover band. (Imagine a Wallflowers cover band? Of all things . . .) And then there are the scores of my mom’s friends whom I love but truly don’t need polluting my feed with posts that almost always start with “Before you read this, wish on a star” and always end with “Now send this to seven friends and you will get your wish!” Horrific. But the fact is, I still care about these people and wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings. I know that if they noticed that I was no longer their “friend,” they would wonder how I could do something so insulting and then I might get a call from my mom asking why I unfriended her friend, and that is exactly the kind of conversation I hope to avoid. Sometimes I hide their feeds, but there are so many people who fit the above descriptions it feels like an endless task. Apparently, not inviting these same people to parties, forgetting to call them back from time to time, and essentially having no friendship with them are less of an affront than merely removing them from my virtual friend circle. Etiquette guru Emily Post would approve of the decision to unfriend. On her
website she advises,
“You may find a time when it is necessary to [un]friend—your list is too big, you’ve had a falling-out/break-up, or someone has been harassing or bothering you. It is definitely okay to unfriend someone you no longer feel comfortable being connected with.” I agree with Emily. In fact, I think we should have an annual celebration of unfriending the people whose activities we wish we were no longer privy to on social media even though we haven’t been able to muster up the courage to finally click “Unfriend.” In August 2013, there was a National Unfriending Day. What a great idea. Perhaps next year, we’ll start a National Unfriending My Ex Day. It may be just what we (I) need.

My wife and I were cooking dinner with my parents one night last summer and my mom (who is literally the nicest person of all time and the last person I’d ever imagine unfriending someone) asked awkwardly, “Kimmy, would you mind showing me later how to stop being friends with someone on Facebook?” (See? She didn’t even know it was called “unfriend.” Bravo, Mom!) So I could have gone two ways with this. I could have simply told her, or I could dig a little deeper to find out who she wanted to unfriend. (I love parent gossip!) But before I could make my decision, my wife exclaimed, “Carol! Who do you want to unfriend?! Do tell, do tell!” My mom shifted a little bit. “Well . . . umm . . .” We carried on, asking her who. “Okay, fine,” she said, “I want to defriend Samantha.” (Samantha was my ex-girlfriend who had unfriended me, most of my friends, and my dog but somehow had decided to stay “friends” with
my mom [!].) It was a brilliant moment. My mom unfriending my ex. Does it truly get any better than that?

I used to think it was silly that my mother refuses to accept people on Facebook if she doesn’t feel close enough with them or doesn’t want to be privy to their daily status updates. But maybe she’s got the right idea; her feed isn’t overloaded, and more importantly, she knows who her friends are. So at the risk of pissing off a large number of people in my fourth-to-seventh-degree levels of acquaintance, I finally decided to follow my mom’s lead and delete the 478 people on my friend list I didn’t know. That left me with 984 “friends”—834 more people than I’m able to keep track of, according to Dr. Dunbar. It’s a start.

I
t doesn’t take much more than a perusal of the comments section of an online article or a YouTube video to know that the net is a powder keg of emotional turmoil and destruction—one little word or sentence or gesture can set off a major war.

The Internet stokes the darkest parts of our personalities: abusive attacks over e-mail, unfiltered texts and tweets, passive-aggressive photo commentary, and one-liner status-update one-upmanship. The daggers can be passive, conveyed by a
lack
of response. Or, our newly acquired ADD speeds up the way we react online and removes most of whatever filter we may have, rendering us incapable of thinking through what we want to say—and making us more willing and able to be cruel to each other. And with the screen to shield us (no matter how many cracks you have in it), we don’t even have to deal with the consequences.

I have often endured the electronic dagger, so much so in relationships that I once attempted to establish a cardinal relationship rule: two people who are dating cannot, under any circumstances, activate the “read receipt” feature on their iPhones or be connected on BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). Now, you may recall my story of how the “read receipt” functionality played a significant role in certain fights I’ve had with my wife. I am saying that I think this is a cardinal relationship rule. I didn’t say that I had any luck following it.

I first learned of the power of the “read receipt” during a certain summer, when I was involved with a girl named Brenda and still had a BlackBerry. She was as beautiful as she was paranoid, and as witty and hilarious as she was suspicious and scheming. And at the time, I was a member of the masses who failed to think twice about adding a girlfriend to my BBM. Constant contact seemed so romantic, so close. I love seeing when you’re typing!

For the non–BlackBerry users out there, BBMing is similar to texting on an iPhone if “read receipt” is turned on. This is nothing like texting or e-mailing. And it’s more involved than instant messenger (IM), though similarly if the phone isn’t turned on or the person isn’t available (on another call or texting with someone else), they won’t get the message. Unlike IM, you can activate a “read receipt” indicator so that once you hit send, one of two indicators will appear next to your message: a “D” for “Delivered,” which means that your recipient’s phone has received the message but he or she has not yet read it; or an “R” for “Read” (with
a time and date), which means your recipient has read your message. If there is nothing accompanying your message, it hasn’t been delivered because the person you are trying to reach is either on the phone or their phone is off or out of cell service range. When you are having a typed conversation on one of these devices, your thought process is revealed: each time you click the mini keys on a BlackBerry or iPhone, the other person’s phone shows ellipses (or, in the case of old-school BBM, a notice that says, “
Kimmy Stolz is typing . . .
”), so the person on the receiving end knows exactly when you started typing, how long it is taking you to type your message, and if you stopped to think during the middle of your sentence. I hate the stop-and-think. Never leads to anything good.

Brenda and I were in constant contact on BBM. We would message each other from the moment we woke up until the moment we went to sleep, during meetings, across tables, and—rudely, I’ll admit—during dinners with our friends. We sent notes about anything and everything—what we were doing, who we were with, where we were going. Sarcastic, biting, and funny messages were interspersed with “I miss you” and “Where are you?” and general information about our lives.

All these notes made us feel quite close, but the constant access became a problem. We were so tethered to each other that if one of us took more than a couple of minutes to write back, the other would go crazy. Our conversations were so frequent and intense that any break became suspicious.

One night, about a month into our relationship, while
Brenda was working late, I went out with my friends to a bar in the West Village. Like a lot of bars in the city, it was on the basement level and had little to no cell phone service. My friends and I were seated at a table in one of the enclaves that, while spotty, had enough service for my BlackBerry. We drank bottles of Malbec and Cava, and as usual, I was BBMing with Brenda, though I had put my phone on silent to save the battery. (God forbid my phone died and I was unreachable. That was basically the same as cheating!)

The first mistake I made that night was to read one of Brenda’s messages and not write back right away. The dreaded “R” that appeared on her message along with my lack of response did not make her happy. While I privately enjoyed a little thrill at not being at her beck and call, she hated the idea that I was doing something more exciting than responding to her message and assumed I was flirting with someone else (which I was not). Two minutes later, I was surprised that my BlackBerry began buzzing and shaking, even though it was in silent mode. I watched as the phone moved around on the table in front of me, knowing it could only mean one thing: the PING.