I always knew that a break up is hard, especially with the popularity of Facebook and what not. I mean, in all honesty, the only reason I joined Facebook in the first place was because of my ex. She was on it all the time, and I did my best to avoid it, but in order sometimes, to just see what was up with her, I needed to go on there. Not that I was checking up on her, but a lot of the stuff she shared that was internet related, she shared on there. Wow, maybe it sounds worse than it really is. Either way, I was able to share in the jokes, the laughs, and the stories easier thanks to Facebook. Then, we stopped being a couple, as is evident in the “ex” labeling. I deleted Facebook all together and I lost contact with hundred’s of friends. Needless to say, after rejoining, I honestly don’t miss them, but at the time it was heartbreaking because not only was I losing someone I loved, but also the people who were a part of my life.
Image: Nutdanai Apikhomboonwaroot / FreeDigitalPhotos.netWell, that’s beside the point, because honestly, nowdays, Facebook is like the flu, but in a good way, in which every person it touches it infects and invades your life for a long period of time. Was that a good analogy? Well, I’m sticking to it, and either way, it does get into the facet of everyone’s life, as more and more people spend their off time telling other people what they’re doing and spying in on the lives of others. All stuff you already know right? Well, what may not be so evident, since this thing is pretty young if you think about it, is the impact it has on relationships. Now, I knew some of this stuff already, but then, I read a Gizmodo article and it REALLY hit home. Thanks to cell phones, e-mail and the social networks, it’s hard as hell to remove someone from your life. And luckily there’s a lot of tips and tricks in this article to help people get through it.
Now, I just want to briefly touch on what it went over and then pretty much go on a whole different tangent…I hope. Anyway, the article gives a lot of advice on how to make it through a break up when someone texts you “We need to talk”, to actually having to untag yourself from pictures and changing your relationship status. Honestly, I never thought that’d be a big deal, but as we say on Geek Love Radio, if it isn’t on Facebook, it isn’t official. And luckily, I never really had to go through that because well, I just disappeared from Facebook all together. When the problems started, I didn’t want to get distracted nor did I want people to be in my business, so I left, but she did not.
Anyway, that’s beside the point, the point is, that the the internet, cell phones, all that make it really hard to break up with someone because their imprint is EVERYWHERE! There’s texts, and e-mails and phone calls and pictures, and home movies, and the list goes on and on, but back in the day before smart phones and the internet it was like easy as pie to just cut someone from your life. There was no exchange, no digital footprints of your happy relationship. Photographs were easily cut up and burned and not shared in other people’s albums. And even if they were, they weren’t albums online for everyone to see. Communications weren’t recorded in text or e-mail, things relied on your memory or on paper that can easily be thrown away. It’s just so much more complicated to get away from the past with the way things are now.
So how am I going to be different? I have no freakin’ clue! I mean, everyone is online, everyone is on facebook. I’d be hard pressed to find my next girlfriend NOT on Facebook. And since I’m a nerd, it’s almost a requirement to be on there for me, and most likely going to be a given for anyone I’m interested in. They have to be into some kind of tech, or into some kind of geekery, and unfortunately smart phones and social networks are a part of that. I can try to find someone who is totally cut off from the internet, and I could do so myself, but holy crap would that be hard. Everything and everyone is on there, so how does one cope?
Well, they can take the advice of the article for one, and two…now that you know what a pain in the ass it is to break up with someone. And believe me, no matter how much you believe something is forever, there is a chance it won’t be, so you have to prepare. Try to make your digital breadcrumb trail of love as minimal as possible. You don’t have to share your relationship status, you don’t have to tag each other in photos on Facebook, and you don’t even have to post them up. They’re yours. What happened to the good old days of physical photo albums? What happened to the time and effort of leaving real paper love notes and letters to one another? There’s romance there. Technology in a way has killed the romanticism of love and how it was to be in a relationship. No more! Make the change, and spare yourself the exorbitant amount of time and effort is going to take to revert should that relationship not work out. But if it does? More power to you. But find a compromise. You don’t have to live a total digital love life, now do you?
