Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do (15 page)

Perhaps the digitally acquired ADD impels us always to search for the next-best thing, making us more willing—and able—to do so. Maybe we feel like running at the first hint of boredom, and the easiest way to go is often to the Facebook page of an ex or a crush, where we can avoid wallowing in whatever present doldrums or misery we find ourselves in and escape into a happy universe based on reality but subject to all kinds of flourishes of the imagination. It’s easy to riff on what you see onscreen and develop romantic feelings for people you’re really not all that connected to in reality.

My friend Molly (not a
90210
character) told me once that being in love is not an actual feeling but a state of mind: you are in love with the
idea
of being in love more than you love the person you’re with, and the relationship endures because you
grow
to love that person. I think today this is more true than ever. When we meet someone, we can find bits and pieces about them on their social media, even if we haven’t “friended” them yet. We can let our minds embellish and exaggerate the parts of their personalities that work for us. “Wow! She likes the Knife! She must also like Hot Chip and MNDR and Haim! She’s perfect for me!” Before we know it, we are thinking about the types of kids we could have together and where we might spend our honeymoon. The person we are “stalking” is putting their best foot forward (or what they think is their best foot) and we are running with it, connecting the details of their Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and Instagram uploads to make them our perfect partner. We fall in love with the idea of them, not who they truly are, on the Web, where there are endless opportunities to interact with an endless number of willing partners. The Internet—and all of the people you might meet there—never shuts down. The door to impulsive action is always wide open—whether it leads to innocent fantasy or more devious affairs. All of the exes you would have lost touch with in the predigital age are now just a click away. It’s never really over. It can begin with little notes, a simple “like” on a status update or two, a few flirty comments on a wall . . . reaching out to someone else only takes one push of a button, so it doesn’t involve
the same degree of premeditation or agony as a face-to-face meeting might entail. It’s easy to dip your toe in and see what you get back. The stakes are low. If you don’t get a response, no big deal.

The Internet not only stirs temptation but also provides opportunities that can be dangerous for relationships. A friend of mine said, “People are more accessible than they once were. If you were to cheat before the existence of cell phones and Facebook, it was much more deliberate. Now we are in situations that seem socially acceptable and it is often too late before you realize it’s not. It can all happen super quickly.” I found it so much easier to slide into my virtual affair with Brenda because we were doing it through the written word—through texts, e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook comments. It started out completely casually and before long I was on that slippery slope.

It’s not like cheating didn’t exist pre-Facebook. But it’s undeniable that our impulsivity has been heightened with these tools. My friend Emily, an NYC-based musician, says that she never would have cheated on her ex-boyfriend had current communication technology not existed. Her boyfriend Todd was her band’s drummer, and the two of them hired a producer, Dylan, to work on one of their albums. After many long days in the studio getting to know each other, and what seemed like harmless flirting, Emily and Dylan started texting sporadically. One night, she received a text from him that said,
Feeling totally conflicted about having the hots for you
. Emily was drinking at my house and, coincidentally, was on a break (they had many) with Todd.
(By the way, I totally subscribe to the Rachel argument in
Rachel vs. Ross
—yes I’m talking about the television show
Friends—
that it is still cheating even if one is on a “break.”) The argument, her anger, the booze, and her phone drove Emily to write back almost immediately with
meet me on 14th n 2nd
, and the rest is history. “I never would have called Dylan on the phone and invited him over,” she said. “And if this were 1995 and I had called him on a
landline
, he never would have been home anyway. So if not for texting, that night wouldn’t have happened.”

After a week of cheating on Todd with Dylan, Emily realized she needed time to figure things out. She told Dylan she was taking a month off from talking to him, and over the next few days, they refrained from speaking or texting. Thanks to the Internet, however, Dylan was still present in her life, and the allure of mysterious messages sent through Twitter and Facebook proved to be too difficult to resist. “I knew that every tweet he posted was like a secret message to me,” Emily told me. “He would tweet lyrics to songs we had listened to together . . . He would send coded messages that no one would understand but me, and through them, he wasn’t violating our no-contact agreement while I cleaned up the mess with Todd.” The secrecy of their messages, hidden in plain sight, made everything sexier and heightened the sense of romance. Although Emily might have eventually ended things with Todd, her texting and tweeting with Dylan expedited her breakup as well as the initiation of a new and lasting relationship. I remember another time when Emily sat at my house debating whether or
not to text Dylan. After a long debate, we decided that she should. She asked him where to meet her; he said he would meet her “anytime anywhere.” So naturally, they chose the Upper East Side, near my house. I attended their wedding last summer. So sometimes there is a happy ending to the “illegitimate” text. Just . . . not often.

Dylan might not have texted Emily, and Emily might not have had the impulse to reply so easily, without the relative safety and distance afforded by their screens. Certain words—especially if they are words that make you vulnerable—are more easily typed than said aloud. It could be said that this is a good thing—that texting and e-mail allow us to do and say things that we do not have the courage to in person.

But it’s also true that the speed and recklessness with which we are able to send our most impulsive thoughts allow temptation to overtake reason with an unhealthy frequency—particularly when combined with alcohol. Most people I know admit to sending drunk texts to an ex (guilty); about three-quarters regret sending those messages, and I suspect that those who don’t probably don’t feel guilty because they didn’t happen to get caught (or had a really great night, or have no conscience). Alcohol certainly lowers our impulse control, but when we are digitally connected, we don’t even need alcohol. We can lose out to the temptation to make our fantasies a reality even when we are sober.

More than one person I spoke to described all of this communication as a “slippery slope.” Are we cheating if
we “like” an ex’s post or photo? If we only have a “textual” relationship and chat over Facebook, IM, or text? If we follow an ex or crush on Instagram or Twitter? Aaron Ben-Zeév, PhD, reviews various elements of the argument in his illuminating article “Is Chatting Cheating?” Apparently, anything we do online—chatting, meeting, or just sending the occasional text—could be harming a relationship.
“People consider their online sexual relationships as real, as they experience psychological states similar to those typically elicited by off-line relationships.” According to those he spoke with, if one partner isn’t aware of what the other is doing, “it’s cheating as it involves deception.” And because of that one simple factor, all the partners he interviewed agreed that there should be no distinction made between online and off-line affairs. Even if one doesn’t cheat physically, it doesn’t lessen the fact that they’ve betrayed the relationship. The problem that a lot of couples face is that one partner doesn’t see an online affair as cheating because it occurs in an “imaginary” realm, but Dr. Ben-Zeév concludes that “since online affairs are
psychologically
real they often cause actual harm to the primary, off-line romantic relationships.”

During my sophomore year of college, I was in a short but strangely serious relationship with a girl named Valerie, whom I had met on my rugby team (yes, I played rugby and, yes, I get the cliché). A few months into our relationship, I got back in touch with a friend from high school who had recently come out of the closet. Her name, incidentally, was also Valerie. (For the purposes of this story,
I will to refer to these women as Valerie1, my girlfriend, and Valerie2, my paramour, even though that is
not
how I referred to them in real life, in public or private.) I began to spend more and more time thinking about Valerie2, and soon enough we were sending texts to each other throughout the day. The messages weren’t flirtatious per se, but I began to disclose details about my life that I should have been sending only to Valerie1. When Valerie2 came to visit me at college about a month after we became reacquainted, the texts, IMs, Gchats, and e-mails began to intensify, and what had once been easy to qualify—to myself—as an innocent and friendly correspondence now took on a tone that was obviously romantic and sexual. And as any cheater knows, electronic communication leaves a “paper” trail: Gmail saves conversations, IMs are stored in hard drive folders, and a simple search on a smartphone can retrieve all conversations related to a certain name. Of course, today, we have apps like Snapchat that appear to be designed for the cheater, or at least the person who wants to avoid any type of saved “history.” Nearly everyone I talk to who has cheated on someone in the past few months, upon hearing my panicked concern that they are going to get caught, responds, “Thank you, Snapchat,” or “That’s why I use Snapchat,” or something about owing their life to Snapchat. But isn’t Snapchat just making things worse? If we were impulsive enough to make mistakes on history-saving mechanisms like e-mail and text, we are triply so on a non-history-saving app like Snapchat (also, I bet all of those Snapchats are saved
somewhere
). Actions have consequences,
whether they are recorded on your text stream or not. At some point, if the affair becomes serious enough, whether via Snapchat, text, e-mail, or Facebook, more avenues are going to be used. Maybe you can conduct a one-night stand on only one medium. But anything beyond that gets more complicated. We are humans. We get sloppy. We leave “paper” trails.

Since Snapchat didn’t exist when I was maintaining my double-Valerie life, deleting conversations, finding folders, and running computer-wide searches for all traces of Valerie2 became part of my daily routine. Each attempt to cleanse my sins by deleting my Web history, chats, and e-mails made me feel even more paranoid and guilty. I deleted Valerie2’s number, e-mail address, and made myself invisible on Gchat, and told her I had to take time away from her. I even named her “NO” in my phone to remind me not to contact her. Despite this, all it took was a weak moment, and it would dawn on me that Valerie2 was a simple click away. Sending an “innocent” text just to say hello or an IM telling her I missed her was all too easy. Over several weeks, I deleted and recovered her number and e-mail address so often that I eventually memorized both, and texting her would only take seconds to act on.

The beginning of the end of my relationship with Valerie1 came to a head one night when I left my AOL IM open on my computer while I took a shower (I was in college, and at the time AOL IM was still alive and breathing as a way to communicate). I had, of course, taken every precaution to delete any incriminating evidence of my textual relationship
with Valerie2—but I didn’t think of everything. With timing that only karma could deliver, my friend Lisa—one of the few people to whom I had disclosed my transgressions—started an IM with me by writing, “Hey Kimmy, just saying hi. How are the Valeries?” Valerie1 happened to be checking her e-mail on my computer, while I was taking a shower and was front and center to see Lisa’s IM. Girlfriends always tend to know more than you think they do, and Valerie1 had previously expressed concern about how close Valerie2 and I had become—an inquisition I had survived and successfully put an end to. But the four words “How are the Valeries?” were enough to confirm the suspicions my girlfriend still harbored. It took me three weeks and a complete suspension of contact with Valerie2 to finally right things with my girlfriend. The relationship was damaged, though, and we broke up a few months later.

• • •

The Internet dangles endless options and temptations. Of course there is a plus side: we can discover new interests (like online book clubs and meet-up sports teams—I’m really stretching to find something positive), and it allows us to stay in touch with old friends we may have otherwise lost track of. But it also can create a false sense of closeness. We may begin to feel a connection, because we have bonded in some way, mentally or emotionally, over something moving or humorous. We both like the same cat video. We both agree that the craze for Lady Gaga is overdone (we must be the only ones in the world who feel this way!). That shared
bond, no matter how small, can be enough to make us
feel
that we have feelings for someone, when it is just a
state of mind
. When you can connect with someone through text and e-mail and social media, it is so much easier to build yourself up into a lather about someone than if you were just maybe running into that person on the street and then going on with your day without seeing the person again. In real life, that person might have had something in her teeth or she might have been wearing Uggs. But online, you’re seeing her on her best day, from her best angle, and you’re bonding over your shared love of Sour Patch Kids or
Breaking Bad
or dry white wine. These seem to you like the first mini-seeds of love. But more so than in real life, you’re not loving a person, you’re loving the
idea
of the person that can be nurtured and tended in your mind. Turns out Molly was on to something.