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

by Kim Stolz

  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.

  Given that it’s never over and the long list of ex-crushes, flings, and serious relationships is always just a click away, we must practice self-control. But sometimes we can’t help ourselves. My own ability to get over and move on from relationships has been slowed by the fact that these social networking tools keep the images and details of these people in my mind. As a friend admitted to me, “I would be able to move on from my past relationship more easily if it weren’t for Facebook. I can see what my ex-boyfriend is up to in a way that I otherwise would not. I can see his day-to-day activities. It’s addictive and it sucks.”

  The constant access to potential, current, and even past lovers in various ways can spur certain hopes within us. Anything can trigger our impulses to attempt a reunion. My friend Jesse started dating Nikki at the beginning of one summer, and by the next, they were living together and quite serious but going through a bickering stage. One evening when we were hanging out, Jesse told me he missed the simplicity of single life and that he felt emotionally drained by his relationship. I told him this feeling was not uncommon in relationships and that he should push through it, especially if he loved Nikki. His patience was clearly waning, however, and one night after work when Nikki had a late dinner meeting, he found himself on his ex-girlfriend’s Facebook page, looking at her recent photos, wall posts, and status updates. On the news feed, he noticed a fateful update from the week before: “Gabrielle is now Single.” The spark of interest, along with the revelation (thanks to a recent “Summer Fun” photo album—I have yet to see a “Summer Fun” album that isn’t asking for an ex to see it and get jealous) that Gabrielle had a new attractive haircut, was enough to ignite a fantasy about what Jesse’s life would have been like had he not broken up with Gabrielle or ever met Nikki. I had always considered Jesse an uncomplicated guy who would not be caught obsessing over any girl, so it surprised me when he told me that over the next couple of weeks he spent between thirty minutes and an hour each day poring over Gabrielle’s Facebook profile, checking her updates and posts obsessively to see if any of them included new men.

  One night, after an argument with Nikki, Jesse decided to write Gabrielle a Facebook message. Gabrielle responded, and one message turned into two, which turned into approximately seven or eight back-and-forths every day for several weeks, at which point Jesse came to me in a panic. He was completely surprised by how quickly his online reunion with Gabrielle had progressed and realized he would have to break up with Nikki if he was going to let it advance any farther without completely going against his conscience and values.

  Whether Jesse was already cheating at that point is up for debate; nevertheless, it had taken just one click of the mouse to get in touch with Gabrielle—one click that helped escalate Jesse’s feelings. He broke up with Nikki and told her that he just needed some time to be alone and that he was not mentally ready to take their relationship to the next level—not 100 percent true reasoning, which was soon publicly exposed when Gabrielle posted photos from the first night she and Jesse finally hung out. Nikki, of course, had friended Gabrielle early on in her relationship with Jesse (she figured, I must friend Jesse’s ex! Keep my enemies closer . . .). Jesse was not aware of their Facebook friendship and Gabrielle had forgotten about it or didn’t care. Nikki was crushed and Jesse found his clothes (which he had been meaning to pick up) outside his old apartment the next day.

  But the twisted game of social media wasn’t over. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, when Jesse found out that Gabrielle had actually gotten back together with her boyfriend—but had neglected to let him know or update her Facebook status—that he realized how much he had allowed himself to get carried away. Jesse’s obsession and imagined life based on what he saw on Gabrielle’s Facebook profile had led him to believe their connection was much stronger than it actually was. It’s easy to forget, but we actually do have a choice about what we post, and Gabrielle’s editorial decisions had fooled Jesse. In reality, she had been seeing her ex-boyfriend and had decided to get back together with him. She may have been using Jesse to make her boyfriend jealous; no matter what, Jesse lost this game of Facebook Fantasy.

  Some lawyers are calling Facebook the “marriage killer.” Mark Keenan of the UK-based website Divorce-Online.com, which allows men and women to file uncontested divorces, scanned the documents filed on his site and found that 989 of the company’s 5,000 most recent divorce petitions contained the word “Facebook.” Upon further exploration, he found that Facebook had actually been a stated factor in approximately one in five divorces filed on his site. Back on these shores, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers announced that 81 percent of its members had seen an increase in cases using evidence from social media sites over the past five years. The same study found that Facebook is the unrivaled leader in providing online divorce evidence, with 66 percent “citing it as a primary source.”

  The Internet isn’t only dangling the
temptation of new relationships, it’s also stoking doubt and suspicion in our existing ones. Even when we’re in happy, functional relationships, almost all of us check up on our significant other via e-mail, Facebook, or Instagram at least once. I talked to a few people who even admitted to hacking into their significant other’s account more than three times a day. One person told me that when she found out her boyfriend’s password, she checked obsessively. All day, every day. “It was as if I couldn’t help myself,” she said. “One day I sat down in my dining room and read every e-mail he had sent or received over the past two years.” Another person told me, “I regret doing it every time—and will probably do it again tonight!”