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

by Kim Stolz

  • • •

  I met one of my best friends, Nicole, while working at MTV. We were close for a few years before she met Dina, who would later become her wife. In the beginning of their relationship, they were long-distance, as Nicole lived in New York and Dina lived in Seattle. They and their long-distance texts were certainly hot and heavy. One late night, Dina texted something to Nicole, but Nicole had to put her phone away because she was at a work function and her boss had come over to have a drink with her. As soon as she got the chance, she found Dina’s name in her iPhone and texted I want to ____ you and then ____ you with ____ (there is really no more I can write without losing my book deal). A few minutes later, Nicole found that she had no response. Five minutes later, still nothing. So she opened up her texts to see what happened. Well, turns out the contact “Dina” was dangerously (a little too dangerously) close to the contact “Dad.” She had sent her father an extremely racy text that would likely change her relationship with him forever (even if just from pure awkwardness). Nicole couldn’t breathe. She found her friend Lauren at the party, who quickly brainstormed a plan to help Nicole. Lauren called Nicole’s dad on his house line, which, thankfully for the believability of Nicole’s story, was named “Home” in her contacts. Her father picked up. Lauren, masking her voice, said, “Hi, I just found this phone at a bar. Some people were messing with it but left it here and I don’t think it’s theirs. Is it yours?” Nicole’s father bought the story (we think) and Nicole got away with seeming irresponsible to her father rather than like a guilty sexter. Nice save, Lauren!

  • • •

  When I was modeling, I was represented by a top agency (which was also an acting agency) that also represented some very famous celebrities (I was not one of them). Every so often, a great party would come up with a sponsor or organization that wanted some big names at their event for the press to write up. The biggest celebrities barely went, but the smaller ones (like me) went often (free drinks, great music, and a red carpet that we hoped would heighten our popularity—win-win-win!). Usually the assistants would send out the party invites and BCC the entire list of talent (you never know when SJP or Jennifer Lawrence might decide to randomly grace your party, and that is a big win—it’s worth a shot). The e-mail would go out to thousands of people: talent, other agents, publicists, and of course press. One sad Sunday, however, one of the assistants at the agency forgot the most important part of the e-mail: to BCC. I remember sitting at my dining room table, opening up the e-mail, and suddenly having the personal e-mail addresses of everyone from Lindsay Lohan (think 2006) to Ben Affleck to Sandra Bullock to three of the Knicks to the entire Trump family! I never ended up doing anything with the list (though sometimes when I see one of their e-mails in my contact list I send them an invite to something like my dog’s first birthday party just because I think it’s funny), but I imagine some of the people on that list (ahem, members of the press) might have found it quite useful. Needless to say, the assistant was fired immediately, just minutes after her fingers touched “Send.”

  • • •

  My friend Kelly dated a guy for five years after college. They had a relatively healthy relationship, albeit a tumultuous breakup. Not tumultuous in a Brenda kind of way but more the type of torrid love that just can’t sustain itself, which almost always leads to drama and heartbreak. After they were unable to make a clean break, Kelly and her boyfriend finally decided that they would stop talking. It gutted them to do so, but it was the only way either of them could move on.

  A few weeks later, Kelly started feeling anxious and panicked that her boyfriend had moved on (she never thought he actually would) and was dating someone else. While she was generally an extremely strong-willed person, the desire to check his Facebook was just too much to bear. So, she signed on and checked. His most recent update was surprisingly depressing. His grandfather had just died and he had posted a photo of him. She felt bad for him. She wanted to reach out and knew at some point she would, but later on, when someone actually gave her the news. She didn’t want her ex to know she had been perusing his page, obsessing. She clicked to scroll down the page to see what else he’d posted. Click she did, but on the wrong part of the page. She clicked “like.” Kelly had just “liked” her ex’s grandfather’s death. Kelly likes this post. Ugh. She tried to undo it but knew the notification would still pop up on her ex-boyfriend’s phone and he would know that she liked the post. Not only would he know she liked the post, but he would know she was stalking his Facebook page. Panicked, she called him immediately but there was no answer. She was insecure and defeated; the last few weeks of being “strong” were erased and it was all because of Facebook.

  • • •

  My friend Clare landed a job the summer before we graduated college at a top NYC law firm. It was an extremely prestigious program that only accepted 5 percent of its applicants. She excelled through the summer and had even been comfortable enough there to come out and tell her coworkers and fellow interns (there were two hundred in all) that she was gay. During the course of the summer, she also managed to find another lesbian in the program—we’ll call her Susie—who was out as well. They became great friends and even shared their respective crushes on the hot and successful female lawyers who were mentors and role models for the interns. Clare and Susie joked constantly about their schoolgirl crushes on Abby, an especially powerful lawyer, who mentored Susie. As the summer was coming to a close, the interns sent around a mass e-mail about what great present they could give Abby to thank her for being such a great mentor: gift certificates, Kiehl’s baskets, even an amazing Balenciaga purse. Clare and Susie maintained their own e-mail correspondence joking about taking Abby out to dinner one-on-one on a date or buying her an apartment and cooking dinner for her there. Susie had replied-all to the two-hundred-person intern mass e-mail chain that perhaps a gift certificate for a dinner for two to Per Se might be a nice idea so that she could take her husband or friend or whomever she wished. People responded, liking the idea, and the conversation moved on to how they would split the purchase. Clare, aiming to get some laughs out of Susie, replied to Susie’s e-mail, intending it to go only to Susie, saying something about wanting to be Abby’s dinner date and hoping to make Abby fall in love with her, and then said some other, um, explicit things that aren’t quite appropriate for this publication. About ten seconds after she hit “Send,” Clare’s phone was buzzing. Susie was calling. Confused, Clare picked up. She could only make out the term reply-all before Clare realized what she had done. She had sent her schoolgirl-crush fantasy about Abby to the entire group. She had replied-all instead of replying to just Susie. Before long, she was called into an HR office (of course one of her fellow interns had ratted her out—how else do you get ahead!?) and her summer was terminated one week early.

  • • •

  My friend Tina had just started hooking up with a new guy. She was excited! But she was also twenty-two at the time and was falling victim to frequent drunk (and very late-night) texting. The lucky guy’s name was Jack, and while the relationship was far from serious, she liked hanging out with him (usually between eleven P.M. and three A.M.). One night around one A.M. she was feeling especially anxious to see Jack, and in order to entice him (in case he was home or didn’t feel like going out) she wrote some rather racy text messages, hoping that it would be enough to get him to come see her. After an embarrassing twenty-five-minute waiting time, a text came through. It read: “Tina. Stop booty calling your forty-year-old married COUSIN Jack. Seriously this has happened several times now. I’m sure Jack is great but I’m certainly not him. Change one of our names in your phone, please.” Tina was mortified. She quickly learned from that experience to always include last names with family members and lovers so as not to write inappropriate texts to people, namely our parents and family.

  • • •

  One of my colleagues, Erin, played volleyball at college. For years, her team felt mismanaged and somewhat mistre
ated by their coach. By Erin’s sophomore year, the seniors on the team decided it made sense to send an e-mail out to the team discussing the best way to stand up for themselves and all of the terrible things their coach had done. At the end of the e-mail, the seniors asked each person on the team to write back an example of the type of behavior or a specific experience they wished to address with the coach. E-mails were fired back and forth about everyone’s worst experiences and what they hated most about their coach. Apparently, one tiny mistake occurred during the e-mail transaction. The coach’s name was Carrie Walsh, similar (too similar) to one of the players, Carrie Wallace. In one of the seniors’ haste, her Gmail auto-filled the “To:” field with “Carrie Walsh” (the coach!). Twenty-six e-mails later, the entire team realized that they had just been sending scathing e-mails about their coach to their coach. The next day, Coach Walsh called a meeting with the entire team. She made the seniors read aloud all of the e-mails and effectively stopped the team from being able to meet with the athletic director or take the matter any further. It was a terrible start to another terrible season.

  • • •

  One person’s devastating humiliation is another person’s chuckles. It’s all LOL until it happens to you, and then sometimes it takes years of deep therapy and repentance before you can even crack a half smile about your embarrassing Internet fiasco. No matter how careful you are, no one is immune to digital mistakes and snafus. And when we’re texting and e-mailing and posting 24/7, it’s hard to keep in mind that once you post something on the Internet or send something to someone else’s phone, it lives forever—and is completely out of your control. Including incriminating photos, drunken texts, and poorly thought-out tweets.

  Of course I can’t deny the fact that these things can also be good. We can get in touch with old friends. We can meet significant others. We can share videos of puppies singing and playing the piano. Worldwide awareness of current events and new developments in the world of art grow and social movements and political agendas gain momentum. We can rally together in the name of what we think is right. The Arab Spring started because of a tweet; LGBT kids all over the country got stronger and braver because of a YouTube campaign called It Gets Better.

  But for every one of those connective and electrifying movements, there’s a deep well of humiliation waiting to be stumbled into and a load of mindless, unimportant drivel that steals our attention and distracts us from what is real—and when I say real, I mean where you are sitting or standing right now, where you exist. Your actual real life.

  7

  Unfriending My Ex

  So that breakup story I mentioned . . .

  Well, one morning a few years ago, I sat on a plane bound for Los Angeles. I was relaxed. I had spent the previous night with Tracy, my girlfriend, and despite some rough spots in the previous months, things were good.

  I opened up my laptop and accessed my e-mail and was surprised to find nothing from her—no message wishing me a good flight or sending her love, which she would usually send without fail. I sent her an e-mail, expecting a quick reply in return. Four minutes passed. No response. Around the fifteen-minute mark, panic set in. I wrote a note to my friend and roommate Kelly and asked her to check up on Tracy by sending her a text and seeing if she read it. She kindly did as I asked while I waited, thousands of feet in the air.

  About fifteen minutes later, an e-mail from Tracy popped onto my screen. That fateful moment will haunt me (and my Gmail inbox) forever. Tracy hadn’t written anything, only forwarded a recent (intoxicated) e-mail conversation that I’d had with my ex-girlfriend (see: Brenda, from previous chapters), in which we lamented that we missed each other and “wished we could go back to the beginning.” Brenda and I had been in touch sporadically since our breakup, and there were obvious romantic overtones to this e-mail chain. You see, Brenda and I would decide to stop speaking for a period of time. Our lives would go back to normal and everyone would be happy until one of us hinted at missing the other via Facebook, Twitter, Friendster (it was still a thing then!), or a Gchat status. By “in touch sporadically” I mean that we were not actually speaking or texting much at all but consistently stalking each other and sending subliminal messages via social media. Brenda and I had been in one of our out-of-touch stages for nine months or so until about a week before my flight. I was in a bar with friends and on a bathroom line, I decided to check my Twitter feed. There it was, glaring in my face: “BrendaDC: Even if you were a million miles away, I could still feel you in my bed . . .” A lyric from “Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart” by Alicia Keys—it was a song we’d both listened to during our out-of-touch periods, and it always reminded us of each other. My heart sank. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to ignore it. When I got home, I posted a video by the same artist on my Facebook page. This could mean one and only one thing to Brenda: I missed her too and I wanted to talk. Two days later we were e-mailing again. Three days later I forwarded the entire e-mail conversation to my roommate Kelly, begging for advice, or maybe just so I could admit my wrongdoing to someone, albeit not to the person I should have. I had forwarded it to her because I just needed to share it with someone. I felt terrible. Of course, Tracy had opened Kelly’s computer to check her own e-mail, and as my luck would have it, Kelly’s e-mail was open and Tracy was able to see my entire e-mail exchange with Brenda. There I was, thirty-seven thousand feet off the ground, realizing that an e-mail I had written while inebriated to an ex-girlfriend that had been inspired by a tweet followed by a Facebook status had cost me my relationship.

  One of the many things I could not get past, and part of what motivated me to write this book, was that I knew I would not have made the same mistake—I would not have contacted a former girlfriend—had smartphones and social networking sites not granted me an easy way to act on a dangerous and damaging impulse. I was to blame, I was guilty, but Facebook, Twitter, my iPhone, and e-mail were my accomplices.

  Recently there was a little meme that went around Instagram and Facebook that said: “If you think your relationship is real, just trade phones for a day. No Passwords. 90% of you will be single again.” This little provocation got so much heat because it’s true that our phones are where we live out a lot of our private lives. And they are filled with temptation. So no matter how much a person intends to stay faithful, the combination of fantasy, impulse, and accessibility (and sometimes booze) keeps the e-cheating train moving. I once heard that couples should always keep “locks” or “passwords” on their phones so that the urge to check up on each other could not be indulged. I come from another school of thought. My wife and I never once put a lock on either of our phones. Sure, in the beginning of our relationship, we both broke down a few times, asked to see texts, or checked up on each other, but to this day neither of us keeps secrets from each other. It just isn’t worth it (and I would like to think that when you find the person to spend your life with, you won’t have any secrets, though perhaps this is naïve). After some time, we didn’t feel the urge to check each other’s phones anymore. Because, you know, we grew to trust each other. Sure, maybe we got to the trusting place in a strange way, but it’s a 2014 kind of way, and it worked. From my past experiences, however, and from talking to my friends and family, I think our open-phone policy may have been in the 1 percent.

  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.