Internet Time Machine
It’s Complicated
Breaking up in the age of social media
This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.
My ex hated social media.
He hated it in the way a lot of millennials do, a rebellion against the idea that because we are the digital generation, we are supposed to be using this new technology. We gripe about the constant connection, but we also complain about how we have this urge, this compulsion, to share every little detail of our lives. I suppose not everyone has this compulsion, though, and that some can resist it better than others. He was only ever on any one platform to keep up with what his friends were doing, but never filled them in on his own whereabouts. I called him a ghost, a creep, a shadow. He’d laugh it off, but he’d keep scrolling. And then he’d put his phone away, and we’d continue on with our time together.
Though he was a consumer of people’s activity, he did not understand why I chose to be active on social myself. He hated the way my phone was constantly buzzing. He hated how I would pause to take a photo, or take an extra second to photograph a meal, or bite my lip as I thought up the perfect way to word a caption, or graft material from a conversation we had for a 140-character joke. He’d give me a look — I called it “The Look,” it was so singular and pointed — whenever I was on my phone because he knew what I was doing. “Don’t start taking photos now,” he’d warn me, which always upset me because everyone else around us was pausing for the ’gram. I felt judged by my boyfriend for wanting to live a digital life. And it didn’t feel good.
You see, I work in social media. (I actually haven’t had a job that has ever had anything more than page views and pixels to show for it in years, but that’s increasingly common.) My job is to post to Twitter, and Facebook, and Instagram, and Pinterest, and Snapchat. I’m supposed to understand how these platforms work — how people are using these platforms, what they respond to, what they click on, what they’re talking about. And you can’t understand anything without a certain level of practice, and you have to constantly practice at an imperfect art form, one that is constantly changing.
“Don’t start taking photos now,” he’d warn me, which always upset me because everyone else around us was pausing for the ’gram.
I love my job. I’m good at my job — as good as you can be at something that’s not an exact science, anyway. But we no longer live in the eight-hour workday. People can’t just take the train home to a family and forget their job at the office. My boyfriend would pause dinner to answer his boss’s pressing late-night email. I would pause to repost a photo from someone’s Instagram account. Sure, I can admit that sounds a little ridiculous, but it’s fun for me. He never quite understood why.
Ours was a relationship where I made more concessions than he did. He made the argument that some things should be kept just between us, and I agreed to keep him out of my feed. We were never Facebook official. Never shared a kissing selfie on Instagram. There exists exactly one photo of him on any of my social accounts. I also carried the bulk of our togetherness, and hung out with him and his friends more than he ever met mine. While he may have hated my relationship with technology, it was that exact relationship that helped move ours along. I texted. I snapped. I called. I asked if we could hang out. He made no real objection. It was virtually no work for him to have me around. I wanted to be there. I made sure I was. We were in a relationship — mostly because I wanted us to be.
But keeping this entire corner of my life off my feeds was harder than I realized because social media is a bigger part of me than I thought it was. It is a huge component of how I express myself. So when we broke up, I started to go through the motions of grieving and mourning, and part of that involved admitting to the world at large (and by that, I mean the internet), on days that were shitty, that I was heartbroken. That I was going through something. That the thing I was going through was a breakup.
It gave people pause. I hadn’t even told them I was in a relationship, and here I was saying that I was nursing a fresh wound. J. D. Salinger says that “the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.” If that’s the case, grief must be a gas. It’s permeating. It seeps in everywhere, even in places where you kept the happiness and the joy out for as long as you could.
In my grief, I didn’t give details about who he was, or how long we dated, because that was and still is not my information to give. He was a part of my life, but is no longer, and it would seem rude to betray one of the tenets of our relationship (however lopsided it may have been). I’m not one for revenge, as much as I would like to be. It’s too exhausting. Besides, painting him immediately as my ex already casts a negative light on him, or me, or us, and what we had. It ended. There must have been a reason why, and that reason must have been decidedly Not Good. Somebody doesn’t win. Maybe neither of us do.
I’ve always found that it’s a lot easier to talk about breaking up than being in love. It’s more tangible, for some reason. You love somebody for all the little details that makes them unique, for all of the reasons that make them not anyone else, and by extension, the singular object of your love. You can’t fully compact that singularity into digestible pixelated bits, as much as we try. But when you break up, there is just a void. It might be a them-shaped hole, but it is that hole-ness that is profound, and it is that grief that we talk about. The anger, and the hurt, and the memories all capsize in on themselves. You sink into that abyss, and you drag people down with you, and you meet other people there at the bottom, other people who have been heartbroken — recently or ever. Other people understand. Other people get your pain. And slowly, you pull your way back out. You find a way.
I climbed back out by talking about him in the abstract. I’m still talking. I’m still healing.
“Honestly, I think your way was better,” a friend told me one day at the bottom of our collective abyss. She had broken up with a very official boyfriend — Facebook official, even, in a time when it feels as if that marker is used more ironically than seriously. (By now, most of us are old enough to remember when being “Facebook official” was a very real thing, a concrete step to take in your relationship. It was The Talk, digitized. So where are we going? We’re going to cement this thing on Facebook. A pixelated stamp on your status. Now, that status is decidedly more complicated.)
But this Facebook-official friend also had the Instagram feed filled with cute dates and couple’s selfies and kisses. They were a “we” couple. They hardly did anything apart. And while their relationship was worlds away from my own complicated experience, and her relationship might have been better and more mature and solid, it was not without its problems. They broke up, remember? Somebody didn’t win. And now, whenever my friend logs into her Timehop — an app that reminds you what you were doing and saying on social media on this day last year, and the year before, and so on — there’s a memory from when they were still together. Every day, she’s confronted with another photo, another tweet, another reminder of happier moments.
It’s silly to think that this is where we are now. That this is our society.
Eventually, she deleted the app. Eventually, she had to delete all of the Instagrams that proved that he had ever been in her life, and it took a bottle of wine and a lot of tears to get through the process. She wanted him wiped from her digital footprint. But years from now, she’ll have to relive tweets and Facebook status updates and the Instagrams he took of her. Her relationship will live forever, because the internet and time are both flat circles.
It’s silly to think that this is where we are now. That this is our society. That I can cite an app like Timehop as a reason for a very real source of renewed heartbreak, and mean it sincerely. But it is, and I do.
I know what my friend means, too, because I have another relationship buried somewhere in my own Twitter timeline, and if I were to log into Timehop at that time of the year, I could relive every first and every last as if it were happening all over again. Most of us could. When you’re happy, you want to share that happiness with as many people as you possibly can. Because of social media, you can share it with everyone. And you can, in a way, make that happiness last forever — even when that happiness only brings you pain. Even if you yourself aren’t so happy anymore. Good things can sour. Love can have an expiration date. It hurts once it’s gone bad.
There is a theory that the couples who put everything on social media aren’t as happy as they seem. That sometimes they’re overcompensating. That no sweet caption in the world can make up for a screaming fight at 3 a.m. We filter and Photoshop and tweak everything. We present only the best sides of things on social media. There might as well be a circle of hell devoted to couples who fight publicly on Facebook.
Yet we still double-tap. We still like. We still fave. We still coo and express jealousy and gamely use whatever hashtag is suggested at each wedding. We love to consume love, even if it’s not our own. Even if we’re fully aware that we don’t see the other side of the story. That’s okay by us. We just want the good parts, anyway.
And like my ex said — I admit it; you were right, which was so hard for me to admit when we were together, I hope you’re laughing about this right now — there is something to the idea that some parts of a relationship are sacred and should be kept between the people in it. Social PDA, the digitized version of making out in front of the lockers, is amplified. Should you share your affection with one person, or your relationship with everyone? Having things for just the both of you is important, and helps strengthen your bond. You can even make the argument that maybe if you don’t have the things that are just-for-the-two-of-us, you might as well not be exclusive at all.
We love to consume love, even if it’s not our own. Even if we’re fully aware that we don’t see the other side of the story.
But even with all of these caveats — the glossed-over perfection, and the constant panging reminders, and the sacredness in the time being — I don’t know if I’d swear off social media entirely the next time I find myself in a relationship with someone. You see, censoring myself all the time was exhausting. Keeping him off my feed — which I use as a representation of my life — was a constant effort in editing out a whole portion of that life, and an entire source of my happiness. Because he did make me happy, in his way. For the time being, he was worth the effort.
Joy is a liquid, remember? And because I couldn’t express it in a way that came most naturally to me, I was drowning.
We are a social society, and for most people, that involves living, in part, on social media. And while it’s important to know how to put your phone down and pay attention to the person sitting next to you — and while I tend to gag when I see aggressive PDA on social media — choosing not to accept that part of someone else means that you’re not accepting them as a whole person.
For all our slang and inability to process words without GIFs and pixelated drawings, it’s easier now than ever to tell someone you’re thinking of them. Liking a photo, faving a tweet — in some small way, these gestures mean we care. We’re learning how to express ourselves in new ways, but we’re still expressing the same emotions. Love is one of those. The heart emoji is the most-used word in the English language. We love love, and I suppose we always will.
Even if we never make it Facebook official.
Keep exploring the Internet Time Machine.
