Ex and why

If there's one rite of passage that confirms you've emotionally arrived at adulthood, it's an emotionally fraught break-up.  You know the drill; your-once-one-and-only-now-new-ex calls, after what may have been months of epic verbal battles and grudging truces, to announce that it's not working and you should break up.  You then spend weeks, maybe even months, chewing it all over in your jumbled little head.  You start to torment yourself (and anyone who is brave or bored enough to listen) with the following questions; what's wrong with me; could I have done things differently; does (s)he miss me; what is (s)he doing now; do they have somebody else.  It's these last three questions that tend to motivate you to engage in the kind of frenzied snoopage that is usually associated with socially inept weirdos and government agencies.  Yet, sometimes curiosity and the very human need to torture oneself just gets too much and one simply has to....

Now, until relatively recently finding out the salacious details of your now ex's life was much more difficult.  I'm not saying that it wasn't possible to find out whether or not they were seeing somebody else or whether they had mentioned you in a conversation.  Indeed, gossips and misery vultures have always existed to hoover up and disseminate news, however banal or corrosive, to those most or least in need of this week's fix.  The thing is that now we have social media we can find this stuff for ourselves so we needn't rely on busybodies to find and hand over the dirt; we can find it for ourselves.  I'm working on the assumption that the ex is somebody who posts their entire being and doings online, which mine aren't.  I'm also assuming that you haven't been blocked from seeing your ex's content...

Step forward Mr Zuckerburg, who is working to decrease the suffering of the broken hearted everywhere.  How's he doing this, you ask.  Well, Facebook are currently trialing a function whereby if a user changes their relationship status from "in a relationship" to "single," the site will ask them whether they would like to restrict the material that their now ex partner can access via the site.

The skeptic in me wonders why this is even deemed necessary.  Surely, if you don't want your now ex to see your beach pics and details of the relationship that you dumped them for, you could just "unfriend" them.  What ever happened to making a clean break if that is what you deemed to be the most appropriate course of action.  Why oh why must we remain friends with everyone online, when we wouldn't in real life?  Cynic that I am I have often theorised that the reason why so many people keep their exes as friends online is so that they can keep them as a sort of insurance option (in case other options don't work out), whilst keeping them at a safe distance.  In other words; you're maintaining contact with them but you're not engaging with them on a level beyond that which is convenient.

That said, I do like the idea of the site blocking any little reminders of your relationship, such as photo tagging and that timehop thing.  I know.  I know.  In times of old you wouldn't have needed this.  You would have either archived or binned any little reminders of your relationship so that they didn't haunt you at your weakest moments.  This was before the likes of Facebook came along and essentially allowed us to archive and broadcast every aspect of our lives so that we could relive every moment, picture by picture, status by inane status.  Whether we like it or not social media may just be here to stay.  The question is not simply how we avoid or get rid of it; it is now how do we utilise it without it encroaching on our mental and emotional space.  This may be one solution to this question.