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

by Kim Stolz

  According to Gary Small, MD, and Gigi Vorgan, the authors of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, the “empathy deficit may not be limited to just young adult and teenage brains. Empathy is learned, but it can be un-learned as well.” They found that teenagers “were much slower to recognize” a happy facial expression after playing a violent video game. They also found that the neural circuits of both “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” were affected after only one week of Internet activity. Technology can impact brains of any age. None of us is immune.

  Dr. Aboujaoude argues that through the Internet, we turn into different people. He writes, “Gentleness, common courtesy, and the little niceties that announce us as well mannered, civilized and sociable members of the species are quickly stripped away to reveal a completely naked, often unpleasant human being.” We just type out responses without filtering them properly. Because we are behind our little screens, it’s a lot easier to insult each other, to type some horrible statement or write something rude or out of line. After all, we’re not saying it to your face. We can’t see your reaction. It does not register in our mind that what we write may hurt you. We have, in a way, forgotten that you have feelings.

  Cyberbullying isn’t just some middle school phenomenon—it’s what we’re dishing out on an increasingly regular basis. Living behind our screens enables us to be crueler than we may intend, inhabiting avatars that are more reckless, selfish, dangerous, and lacking in compassion, even toward the people we love. We rely on our screens to give us the confidence to express our feelings—however passive—or overtly aggressive. As Dr. Aboujaoude explains, “our online self is also dangerous and irresponsible, running roughshod over our caution and self-control. It can encourage us to pursue unrealistic or unhealthy goals . . . it can encourage us to behave more selfishly and recklessly.” I recently gave a speech in Houston to an all-girls school on social media, sexting, and cyberbullying. I spent the morning and part of the afternoon with the student body, about nine hundred high school girls, and heard their stories and the ways that social media was affecting their lives. Like any other high school kids today, they had horror stories relating to sexting and cyberbullying, and of course thousands of anecdotes of feeling left out, lonely, or ganged up on by social media. I’d heard most of it before. But then they mentioned something called “sub-tweeting” or “subliminal tweeting.” I consider myself pretty well connected but this was the first I’d heard of this new activity on Twitter. Sub-tweeting is when someone tweets a statement about another person but does not mention them by name. For instance, if Kelly, Dylan, and I are having lunch and Valerie sits down (and Kelly clearly does not want to sit with Valerie because she despises her), Kelly might tweet, “Guess someone didn’t get the memo that we didn’t want to sit with her.” Kelly has sub-tweeted. Dylan, Valerie, and I all follow Kelly, so we will see the tweet and all secretly know that she is talking about Valerie. This anonymous tweeting gives us a false sense of freedom to say anything we want because we don’t feel like we are truly addressing the person, nor do we feel responsibility for their feelings due to the technical anonymity of our sub-tweet. It’s the newest kind of cyberbullying, and it’s spreading every day because it’s so easy. As we all know, it’s addictive to be in on a secret, and to be in on a sub-tweet is exactly that.

  For her thirtieth birthday, my then-girlfriend Gina wanted to throw a small cocktail party for her closest friends. Of course, we knew there would be people we had to leave off the guest list—once you invite any peripheral friends, the floodgates open and there are fifty more you’re obligated to invite, and you might as well post the event on all of your social media for the entire public to see. After mulling over the endless lists of best friends, mutual friends, and obligatory invitees, we arrived at a sane number of guests. We knew that there would probably be four or five people who would be insulted to have not received an invite and would probably be disappointed when hundreds of Facebook photos were splattered across their feed, but we were happy with the list, and we went with it. The party was a huge success, and as we expected, our guests posted photos onto Facebook. As Gina and I went through the album, we noticed that one name reappeared in the comments section of several photos.

  “Wow! What a great party, wish I had been there!”

  “Everyone looks so beautiful. So sad that I missed it.”

  “Whoa. Looks like this night was a blast . . . Almost as much fun as we had in Cabo . . .” (Ellipses are always a sure sign of intense feelings, insecurity, or contemplation, and this comment had two sets of ellipses, so I am pretty sure this person was feeling terribly left out.)

  The comments were made by Camille, one of Gina’s high school friends, who had narrowly missed the cut. She was one of the few we felt bad about (but not bad enough to invite her). Her comments on Facebook, however, reminded us why we kept her off the list: the truth is that she and Gina had been friends in high school, but this was fifteen years later and they simply weren’t that close. If she felt close enough to the birthday girl to be invited to her thirtieth birthday and was hurt when she wasn’t, perhaps she might have felt close enough to talk to Gina in person about it. Instead, Camille opted to make her point in front of the thousands of people (friends of friends) who could see the album.

  Facebook and other social media provide a venue for people to express feelings without the consequence of an awkward in-person or on-phone response. It is easy to get in that first or last jab without having to feel embarrassed or defensive or to fear any repercussions. Like the boss who uses a human resources team to fire his right-hand man, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites have become mediums for the meek and cowardly.

  Every impulsive statement and every irrational reaction seem to make their way onto the screen. Passive-aggressive tendencies and cruelty are magnified as impulse overrides our ability to contemplate what we really want to say and how it may impact the person we’re “talking” to.

  If we get into an argument, our typed responses overflow onto the screen, interrupting each other as we try to get our point across without reading the other person’s messages back. We’re not even thinking through what we are typing. In these heated, filterless moments, we are capable of easy, thoughtless cruelty. On the other side, the person we’re fighting with may not even be reading our responses because they are clicking their own keys just as furiously. Often a fight that did not even have to happen—and would most likely not have happened in person—escalates into something much more damaging. As William Safire wrote in his former “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine, “The pregnant pause has been digitally aborted.”

  Tone runs the very likely risk of being lost online. “When people tease or bully face-to-face,” says Dr. Robin Kowalski, Clemson University psychologist and author of Cyberbullying: Bullying in the Digital Age, “they use off-record markers (winks, smiles, etc.) to indicate the intent behind their behavior and to assess its impact.” But when we are online, hidden behind a screen, we miss these nuances. One can never tell if a sarcastic comment is truly sarcastic or if the writer is typing an actual opinion. We’ve lost the ability to read people. No matter how many emoticons we use, reading someone’s words on a screen seldom allows us to fully understand that person’s tone. It’s hard to tell over text whether you are being teased or abused. This is part of the reason emojis have become so crucial to text talk. A statement that can read as mean or undermining gets much nicer (or harder to assail) with a little smiley face next to it.

  My friend Keryn once told me that I should watch the nuances of my text messages because they often made transparent my insecurities. She told me, for instance, when I said something that I wasn’t sure would be taken well or perhaps made a joke that I wasn’t positive was funny or not, I always wrote ha at the end of the text. Even worse than that, I apparently was also utilizing the ha when I wrote something desperately insecure. I feel like you’re ignoring
me ha or I should probably just go home I’m so hungover ha. Now, reading it back to myself, it does sound insecure, and overwhelmingly so. We forget not only the indelibility of texting and posting but also how much of what we’re trying to hide or project is blatantly obvious to everyone else.

  So as we forget the implications of what we’re writing, whether or not we’re taking the time to consider the consequences of our actions, we’re still acting with agency. We usually know what we’re doing while we’re doing it. I have posted photographs of myself with new girlfriends—and looking back, it was probably just to make my exes jealous and to show off how fabulous and better my life is without them. I wasn’t being consciously mean-spirited, but I think subconsciously, I knew what I was doing. I knew it would be hurtful for my ex to see me happy with someone new. I have a friend who consistently posts photos of herself and a “celebrity” friend. Sure, they are truly friends. I know that. But they are not ten times closer than she is to her other friends, yet she posts about this particular friendship ten times more. I know it’s childish and preening. But that’s what we do to show the world and ourselves how happy and amazing our lives are.

  After Brenda and I had stopped speaking, a Facebook war broke out. It was actually more of a cold war, because we never fought or spoke directly. We were both in new relationships but were still embittered from our breakup, and Facebook and Twitter were the perfect tools to make one another jealous. One of the things that had bonded us was that we are both foodies and always enjoyed going out to new restaurants or cooking fantastically complicated meals and posting pictures on Facebook or Twitter. This became the focus of our new war. One of us would post a photo and description of something we had just cooked for our new significant other, and within an hour there would be a new photograph of an equally complicated and tasty meal on the other’s profile. I’d upload a photo of seared tuna with shaved truffles with the words “Fourth course at Eleven Madison Park,” which would be followed a few hours later with Brenda’s “Finishing my fifth course at Per Se—farm fresh eggs with thyme smoked prosciutto. Best meal EVER.”

  It was silly, competitive, and clearly pretentious. I could have avoided all this by cutting Brenda out, unfriending her on Facebook, or unfollowing her on Twitter, but I couldn’t turn away; I wanted that access, just as I’m sure she wanted that access to me. I think we both also forgot how incredibly stupid we looked to our other friends and the rest of the world that was viewing us on social media. All either of us cared about was what the other saw; we were posting for each other. We forgot that others were still reading our posts and judging us. When I got engaged to the woman I’d later marry, naturally, I posted the news on Facebook. Four days later, Brenda posted that she’d gotten engaged. I had assumed our cold war was over. It had been so long that I don’t think we were still tacitly playing the strange digital game, but that coincidence certainly made me think twice.

  We would never dream of bragging out loud in person, but cloaked as a status update or tweet it’s suddenly all right to self-promote, self-congratulate, and otherwise flaunt every nuance of one’s life. The way we announce our relationships with one another is no exception. When Facebook offered its users the ability to declare their relationship status to their friends, a new sort of silent electronic dagger came into the world. People began to announce that they were “In a Relationship,” “Married,” or the dreaded “Single.” This new rite of passage forces some undeclared couples to have a “state of the union” discussion. I’ve heard some people joke that if the relationship isn’t posted on Facebook, it isn’t happening in real life. And then there are the poor souls who learn about the lives of exes, crushes, or hookup buddies and ache with the grief of unrequited love. The potential for pain is massive.

  My friend Kate had been in love with the same boy, Brandon, since college. Their on-again-off-again relationship had monopolized her emotional life since sophomore year. After graduation, Kate stayed in California but Brandon moved to Seattle with another girl who had gone to college with them but whom Kate didn’t really know. Kate was devastated. She found solace, albeit the kind that keeps you awake at night, in the fact that Brandon said this relationship wasn’t serious. He also came to visit every other weekend, staying with Kate as if they were boyfriend and girlfriend. They had nightly phone conversations (after Brandon’s girlfriend fell asleep) in which they mutually professed their love for each other and lamented the fact that they lived so far away. This went on for years. Either he had a crisis of conscience or a panic attack about his girlfriend finding out, and Brandon decided that he needed to end things with Kate. Five or ten years ago, he might have called her—or even met her in person—to break off their affair. In a worst-case scenario, he might even have written a long, tortured letter (or e-mail!) explaining that he couldn’t betray the girl he hadn’t expected to fall in love with but now found himself utterly connected and loyal to. Brandon didn’t do any of those things.

  It was a Thursday evening before the second weekend of the month, which meant that Brandon would be arriving in California the next day and Kate would have a boyfriend for approximately forty-eight hours. In bed, Kate went through her nightly Facebook routine—reading through her news feed, allowing her mind to wander the endless tangents of mutual friends’ photos and wall updates. Then she got to Brandon’s profile. She liked to look at his photos, and in the safety of the nonjudgmental confines of her room, she would dissect them, especially the few of him and the girl he had actually dismissed as a “casual fling.” Brandon usually avoided posting photos of himself with the girl. (I had always believed he untagged them out of fear that Kate would finally realize that his relationship was far from casual and break up with him.) That night, though, as she arrived on Brandon’s page, something was different. Kate noticed his new profile picture right away. The girl was in it. Four inches below that was the status update dreaded by any ex: “Brandon is in a relationship with Andrea.”

  Throughout her relationship with Brandon she had turned Andrea into a faceless and nameless nonperson. But as Kate clicked over to Andrea’s profile, which was open for everyone to see, she found out where Andrea worked, that she had recently gotten promoted, that she loved the Rob Lowe movie About Last Night . . . Andrea was real. Kate felt almost guilty for looking, as if she were snooping, even though Andrea had made everything visible. And more than that, Kate finally had to accept that she herself was the other woman, and that the other other woman had won.

  That night, for the first time in a year and a half, Brandon didn’t call Kate to say he loved her. Perhaps he was avoiding her, as he knew she would have seen the new posts. When he arrived in California, he didn’t head straight to her apartment, either; instead, he texted her to meet for the dreaded coffee. She agreed to go, if only just to confront this sudden turn of events. It turned out that he hadn’t had the heart (or the guts) to tell Kate that things had gotten serious with Andrea but still lamented that she had found out through Facebook. What a liar. Brandon was completely aware, like any person under the age of eighty (it actually turned out that Kate’s grandmother had found out as well—she liked to peruse Kate’s mother’s Facebook from time to time, and Kate’s mother was also friends with Brandon), that if you post something on Facebook, the news will reach scores of people within minutes and everyone you know (and want it to reach) within two hours—especially if someone is looking for it, as he knew Kate would be. He had virtually vomited the details of his relationship all over his Facebook profile, making it embarrassingly obvious and impossible to miss. Brandon had let Facebook do his dirty work.

  A graphic designer by the name of Lee Byron wrote about a poll conducted on Facebook that found that 75 percent of those born before 1975 broke up with significant others in person, while those born after 1984 are twice as likely to break up via the digital world. Further, a 2011 study by a market research firm revealed that 33 percent of people have ended their relationships over Facebook, text, or e
-mail. We are relying on digital means—Facebook, Twitter, texting, instant messenger, Gchat—to avoid the mess of dealing with each other’s emotions. An impetus for my writing this book, among other things, was that I was, in fact, broken up with via e-mail when I checked my e-mail at thirty-seven thousand feet in the air aboard a plane to Los Angeles. (I’ll get to that shortly.) The Internet is full of wonder and possibility but it can also shield us from the dirty work of life, letting us unplug and power down any time we feel a little bit of discomfort.

  6

  I Didn’t Mean to Do That

  Texting and Facebooking and tweeting and Instagramming and e-mailing move at lightning speed and require a fast response. When we move quickly, we are often sloppy and make careless mistakes. Arguments get out of hand more quickly in text than in person, and as we Instagram, tweet, and update our Facebook statuses more quickly than our good judgment can control, our inadvertent and mistaken actions have consequences that can reverberate in our lives, even if they do give us plenty of fantastically hilarious stories to tell.

  Nearly everyone I know has slapped their hand to their forehead or felt the pins and needles rising up in their body after the realization that they made a digital mistake.

  As the writer of a book on this topic, I would be remiss if I failed to include the best (the worst) stories of accidental “liking,” drunk texting, messaging the wrong person, and of course my favorite, the accidental reply-all. Below are my favorite stories in this category. All of them happened to someone I know and I apologize if you find yours here.

  • • •

  Let’s start with something rather benign. When I was dating Samantha, I had a daily routine of checking Brenda’s Facebook page. I liked to see what she was doing and mostly who she was hanging out with or (cringe) dating. It was harmless, albeit weak, but everyone I knew was guilty of committing the same crime, so I accepted my own weakness and stalked on. One night at dinner with Samantha and another couple, I felt a sudden urge to check Brenda’s Facebook. Under the table, I managed to guide my fingers and navigate my phone to my Facebook app. I was so proud of myself for being able to do this blind—what a thing to be proud of! In my glory, I fumbled the next step. Instead of clicking the search button where I was planning to write Brenda’s full name and click on her profile, I found myself in the “Update Status” box. I typed in “Brenda Taylor.” Before I had a chance to peruse what I thought would be her Facebook page, the conversation turned to something pertaining to my work and I reengaged in the dinner, answering a few questions and forgetting about my stalking quest for the moment. A few minutes later, my phone buzzed. It was my friend Amy. Kim—wtf are you doing on Facebook? I had no idea what she meant but I was suddenly dizzy with anxiety. I looked down at my phone. My profile’s most recent update, which appeared in every single one of my friends’ feeds (including Samantha’s), read “Kimmy Stolz is Brenda Taylor.” I went into a panic and quickly deleted it. I think I got lucky because Samantha never brought it up. But I assume, given the frequency with which we all check our Facebook accounts, I shared my transparent stalking with at least four hundred to four hundred fifty friends during the ten minutes it was up before I managed to delete it.