Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do

by Kim Stolz

  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.

  5

  It 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.

  The dreaded PING was originally created by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) as a means of getting the attention of a phone’s owner, perhaps in an emergency. Many, like me, leave our phones on silent to prevent unnecessary distractions. As long as the phone has service, though, the PING function will override the user’s current setting and make the BlackBerry vibrate, flash, and beep, regardless of where you are or what you are doing. In an emergency, I would imagine this to be useful. In a relationship (or a business meeting), it is not. That night I began to realize that each time I failed to answer a BBM within four or five minutes—even if we were having a mundane conversation about nothing at all—Brenda would PING me, demanding my attention and response. It was annoying and aggressive. And I totally admit that I did the same thing to her many, many nights.

  The only thing in the PING! family that is even more aggressive and annoying is the more and more frequent abuse of the Find My iPhone application. One of the great things about having an iPhone is that if you lose it, you can sign in to iCloud or an application called Find My iPhone and locate your iPhone. The application also has a great feature for those of us who generally lose their phone while walking around their own apartment. It’s on the shelf! On the terrace! In the refrigerator (yep, I’ve done that)! If you click “Play Sound,” your iPhone will make a shrill pinging noise until you find it and click a button. Whether your phone is set to silent, vibrate, or loud, this same vibrate-and-ping noise will occur. Now, if I were to guess, I’d say most people in serious relationships know each other’s Apple ID (which is all you need to sign in to Find My iPhone). We are always on each other’s phones, downloading music, playing Candy Crush, ordering SeamlessWeb. If my wife’s phone is dead and she wants to do any of the aforementioned, she just uses mine. It’s normal. But what’s not normal is something that happened to my friend Kelly. She was out to dinner with four of her friends and happened to be in a fight with her boyfriend at the time. She was annoyed and placed her phone facedown on the table (note that it was still on the table) and put it on silent. She had to at least enjoy one course with us without maniacally texting. About nine minutes later, a shrill noise came from her side of the table. We all knew the noise. But why was Kelly trying to locate her phone when she and we all knew it was right in front of her? And then we realized it. It could only be one thing: Kelly’s boyfriend had become frustrated with Kelly’s lack of response and had subsequently signed on to Kelly’s Find My iPhone or iCloud application and clicked “Play Sound.” Outrageous and inappropriate as it was, it got Kelly’s attention. She picked up her phone, embarrassed, and went outside to call her boyfriend. She never came back in. (That sounded really ominous. She’s still alive, she just left dinner. But anyway, enough about her, back to the story about me . . .)

  So around midnight, Brenda sent me a note that said she was going home to sleep. We BBMed “good night” and I went back to the conversation with my friends. Shortly thereafter, we left our table and went to dance in the back room, where there was barely any service. I put my phone in my pocket in case anyone (Brenda) needed to reach me. Around two A.M., my friends and I decided to go home, and we walked upstairs to street level. As my BlackBerry regained consciousness, my pocket was attacked by buzzing. Clicking to my BBM, I found four messages from Brenda:

  “How’s your night?”

  “Wow. You’re so shady.”

  [PING!]

  [PING!]

  [PING!]

  [PING!]

  “Cool. I get it.”

  I couldn’t tell what time each of these messages had come in (they had come in pairs as my service was spotty), but I could only imagine where Brenda’s mind had traveled over the previous two hours. I knew where she was coming from; I wanted replies from her as much as she wanted them from me, and I hate waiting for people to text me back.

  Despite the hour, I called to check in, but she screened. I could tell she was doing this because I heard two and a half rings before her voice mail picked up. That was one good thing about being addicted to my phone: I knew ring patterns by heart. Zero or one and a quarter rings means the phone is off or out of service (in New York, this usually means someone is on the subway—or in an underground bar); four or five and a half rings before voice mail means the person missed your call (or was “missing” it on purpose); and anything in between, like the almost-three rings I got that night, means a screen—the person you’re trying to reach doesn’t want to deal with you at that particular moment (or they do, and they’re making you work for it) and has pressed ignore your call. I hung up, confused and bothered. I thought Brenda wanted to talk to me—why else would she send me those BBMs? I left a message, pleading with her to talk to me. Then, like clockwork, a BBM came through: “I don’t want to talk to you. Leave me alone.” Now, anyone who has dated me knows that this kind of statement will lead to one thing and one thing only: another phone call. I called Brenda again. Once again, two and a half rings. Then came two BBMs:

  “So as soon as I go to sleep, you turn off your phone so that you don’t have to be reachable? Why would you not want to be reachable? I’m assuming she was very pretty.”

  And:

  “Hope it was worth it.”

  • • •

  In a way, Brenda and I were playing a new digital version of hard to get, and it was all about control. If I took three minutes to respond, she would take almost four. If I took twenty-five seconds to write back, she would take twenty-six. It was a game, and Brenda played it well. Exhilarating and exhausting, it went on for our entire yearlong off-and-on relationship.

  I considered each of her zings (and nonresponses) to be electronic daggers and imagine that if we had spoken on the phone or if we were in person, Brenda would not have said t
he things she wrote. But that’s the clever (and enraging) thing about texting and social media: one can be as nasty or passive-aggressive as humanly possible without having to endure (or even fully imagine) the reaction of the person on the other end of the exchange. In the digital realm, people can write things that they would normally be too embarrassed, afraid, or self-respecting to say. The ability to text, e-mail, or instant-message from behind a screen allows people to get their point across without having to listen to the other person’s side of the story. The writer never has to accept the other person’s point of view, and the unfairness or cruelty of the comment is never reflected back in their face. Plus, we can always just choose to turn off our phones when we’ve had enough (or if we actually start to feel something).

  I have found that it’s so much easier to write quick, mean notes over text or e-mail if I am frustrated, angry, or upset. Dr. Aboujaoude cites Dr. Jeanne B. Funk, a psychologist at the University of Toledo, who is concerned that we’re becoming less moral and more cruel, because the “desensitization makes us bypass the moral centers of the brain and robs us of our ability to empathize.” Dr. Wicker notes that it is certainly easier to be aggressive through electronic communication, as “we escape the consequences of our aggression when we do not have to endure the empathic pain that face-to-face communication would likely bring.” I have had brutal fights over text but as soon as I am in the same room as the person, the fight seems to die down and things are okay again. How could I tell them such mean things in person? It just seems cruel. Over text, it’s a game and anything goes. Simply put, we are more capable of feeling empathy when we are looking at someone’s face, at their eyes, seeing and receiving their feelings.