21st Century Relationships: Or, How Mark Zuckerberg Really Screws with Break Ups

Based on nothing more than movies and TV shows, this is how relationships seemed to go in the past. (Beware--exaggeration ahead!)

Boy passes note to girl in class, offers carries books. Boy calls girl, is polite to dad on phone, asks girl out on date for Friday night, probably a drive-in and a malted milk. Boy does pathetically obvious casual yawn-arm reach, drives girl home by curfew, hopes for kiss. Repeat. Throw in a letter jacket, a class ring, a corsage for prom, and various rapey-attempts to get laid in the backseat of car and you're boyfriend/girlfriend. Perhaps this couple gets engaged before he heads off for the war, or maybe he gets a Dear John letter while overseas. Maybe they break up because Sally wouldn't bone him, but Jane would. Upon said breakup, jackets and rings and mementos would have to be dealt with, and you might have to pass each other on your way to Algebra.  

Now, you meets someone, statistically online. Before your first date, maybe you Google them. You email back and forth a bit, then start texting. You go out a few times, email back and forth when you should be working, excited for a mechanism through which you can "spend your day together." You decide to be exclusive and have a "moment" in which you delete your Match profiles together. You may or may not utter the phrase "I'm not sleeping with anyone I'm not friends with on Facebook!" and then watch, giddily, wearing nothing but cute undies and a silly grin, as he enthusiastically reaches for his iPad to send you a request. Maybe you change your relationship status (or at least discuss why you find this step silly). You follow each other on Twitter, Instagram, Vine, and maybe even connect on LinkedIn. You maybe share a Netflix or Hulu Plus login. You sext. As time goes on and you meet each other's friends and family, your friend lists grow. You Skype when he travels abroad for work and are glad to hear each other's voice, even if his slow bandwidth prevents you from actually seeing each other. When he sheepishly admits to looking at your profile picture a couple of times a day to see your smile, you fall a little bit more in love with him.

And then when you break up, you have to undo all of it.

You delete his number from your cell phone to avoid drunk (or spite) dialing--even though duh you have it memorized--and unlock and delete the sweet texts you'd saved. You unfriend and untag and unfollow. Hide from buddy lists and remove from Skype contacts. Sure, there are tangible mementos, too, but you also have the digital copies of pictures, some of which are shared on a Google drive folder you have to delete, and somehow this step is weirder than throwing the lovenotes and cards and stuffed hippo from your date to Dave and Buster's in a box in the garage. You login one last time to delete your little smiley faced avatar on his Netflix, possibly (ok, totally) hoping the next time he sits down to watch Top Gear or Archer reruns he notices it's gone and gets a case of the sadz.

This shit will slowly kill you if you let it.

Basically, these days, even if you are no longer in physical proximity to an ex, it's really, really hard to escape them in the immediate aftermath of the end. Each of these technological undoings is like hammering a mini-nail in the relationship coffin. Gchat, bang. Facetime, bang. His mom's cell phone number, bang. You think to yourself  "this is so dumb that I'm even talking to my friends about how awful it was to be blocked on Facebook," and yet it also legitimately hurts. You hide the adorably named email folder, but can't quite bring yourself to delete the contents because, goddammit, that is a written record of how good it really was, even if the last entry is the one in which he said "I need to be alone."

A recent article cites research that discovered that it takes 224 tweets to fall in love. Obviously, this "science" is crap, but it highlights the new found ways in which relationships are at the mercy of technology. As stupid as it sounds, one of the worst nights in the narrative arc of my divorce was the night I discovered my ExH had unfriended me. This is a 21st century way of saying "You no longer get access to my life." Being blocked is worse because that is a 21st century way of saying "you no longer exist, period." It doesn't matter why it happened--for all you know, it's because you have two dozen mutual friends and his seeing your comments or tagged check-ins or "so and so likes her status" is painful for him and you think for a second "that's right, motherfucker, you should be hurt."

But honestly, all that matters in that moment is the technological twist of the proverbial knife in your already broken heart.

You know, of course, that deep down it's all better this way. You are grateful to whichever geek Zuckerberg hired who wrote the line of code whose zeros and ones translate to "if two people un-marry each other do not ever recommend them as 'people you may know' despite their having tons of mutual friends." Just like it was easier when your high school boyfriend broke up with you that you lived in different districts, you know that interwebz  absence will help you heal faster. Yet unlike merely allowing the memories to fade--aided, of course, by bourbon and distance and time and occasionally making good/bad decisions with your pantsparts--these technological factors require active undoing and stuffing away the knowledge that you could, easily and for the rest of your life, reach out. Be reached out to. Somehow that makes it worse.

And there is no App for that.

Known Unknowns

Ok, I admit upfront that I am almost disgusted with myself for titling this post with a reference to a quotation by Donald Rumsfeld--I generally find him, his cronies, and his worldview deplorable. (Generally? That's being, um, generous.) However, it is *sigh* fitting for this very moment, so what the hell.

Before I launch into the actual "content," I'm  just going to lay my proverbial cards on the table. About a month ago, I got my heart smashed into smithereens, and I'm going (back) to counseling to deal with it and the issues surrounding it/relationships/etc. (Upswing--based on my health plan, counseling is free. Hell-to-the-friggin'-yeah I say about that.) I am a firm believer in self-help, professional help, and working through our shit in order to be a better work in progress. My counselor--an older gentleman originally from Brooklyn who still has a touch of his accent despite living in Appalachia for nearly three decades, which, dare I say, is refreshing to hear--suggested I "write a letter you'll never send," which I shot down. (He did tell me at our initial session that I could talk back, reject his ideas, interrupt him, etc. We're going to get along great!) I told him that writing "for me" is just not something that works. "It's like the difference between keeping a journal and writing a blog."

"Well," he asked, "do you blog?"

So here I am. It's been nearly 4 months since my last post; I had a wacky, topsy-turvy, emotional roller coaster of a summer. And, like my friend Sarah, I am going to venture into soul-puking. Somewhat guardedly, and there are some topics that will be off limits--like ex-bashing; as Beyonce proclaimed, I'm better than that (and he mostly doesn't deserve it)--but I am hoping to use this space to process out some stuff--even if I get to edit it as I go in a way that ye olde "letter you'll never send" doesn't require.

Here goes.

In addition to the usual emotions that accompany a break up--rejection, loss, anger, etc.--and how they manifest themselves--insomnia, exhaustion, loss of appetite, wocka--this particular break up came with it a whole host of other, domino-effect kinds of consequences. I mean, part of ending anything remotely long-termish is that not only is it a death of a pairbond, but it is also the death of the plans for that pairbond. And, lest you forget, I am a planner. I love plans. I like knowing things in advance, or at least what I can expect to some degree. I, for example, tend to look up the menu for a new restaurant before going, so I can get a sense of what I might order. I do this partially to manage expectations, but it also helps me get really excited about what's to come. Once I have some basics of a situation down, I tend to adapt pretty easily to the rest of it, but I like having at least a skeleton of an idea heading in, if I can. I realize there are no guarantees in life, but the things I can control, even a little? Well, I like to give that a go, thankyouverymuch.

And this break up, in addition to being emotionally devastating, really fucked up The Plan. The Plan for my job. The Plan for my geography and community. Based on our pre-breakup conversations that most couples have when they believe in the permanence of the unit, this breakup fucked up The Plan for that nebulous place in time we lovingly call "the future." The Plan that I was really, really looking forward to for a variety of reasons.

So now I'm left with a whole host of Known Unknowns--damn you,  Rummy!--that are all sort of linked together in one big clusterfuck of uncertainty.

I don't know when I will be able to get out of my current location, which is a town I do not want to live in longer than is absolutely necessary. I'm making the best of it--tis my nature, though at the moment I am also allowing myself to be grumbly--but this is not where I see myself for the next five years, let alone for "the rest of my life." The (Previous) Plan involved relocating to a super neat, totally "me" kind of place--a place that, despite having only been there for three weeks, gave me that "I feel at home here" kind of peace.

I don't know where my career will go.  This is directly tied to the above, of course, but also separate, because of the nature of my current field/profession. The (Previous) Plan allowed for relocating without the requirement of full-time work, at least temporarily, due to the financial situation inherent in cohabitation/two-income households, especially when one member makes a significant amount of money. Now, in order to not be a job-hopper--frowned upon in most professions, but especially academia due to the nature of tenure--I have to seriously weigh moving for New Job against Holding Out. A bird in the hand versus bush situation to be sure, but also not one to be taken lightly. Basically, I have to be prepared to keep that job for the next five years in order to not potentially screw up my career permanently. (Assuming I want to stay in academia, which is a wholly different topic.)

I don't know how deeply my new set of friends and I will be invested in one another, because we're all sort of temporarily in this current location. How do I feel about that? How do they? One member of this circle--affectionately referred to as The Dolphin Pod by another member--said I've been "snatched up into it like a venus flytrap," but it's also exhausting to start over. My friendships are important to me, and I've never really had trouble making friends as an adult, but we're all also itching to get out of here--yet we all might also be here forever.

I don't know how invested to become in my community at large. I'm volunteering at the co-op for something to do that I believe in, plan to volunteer at the rape crisis center, and/or domestic violence shelter, and/or local branch of Dress for Success, for the same reasons. I might join the local roller derby team, too, because it scares the ever-loving shit out of me, which is, at the moment, enough motivation to pursue it in the name of Being Expansive. I'm too antsy and social justice oriented to just go to work, the gym, and home every day, but there's also mental energy required in these investments, not to mention things like commitment and dedication to the organizations.

Because I'm trying to get out of here (and because I'm just, you know, not mentally there yet), romantic pursuits are currently off the table, and, if I'm being honest, I doubt the next guy is in these here parts anyway. So not only do I not know when my next potential relationship will start--which is fine in theory, but also something I desire for my life--I don't know the next time I will have human contact outside of a platonic hug. (Seriously--that rent-a-cuddle-buddy idea is brilliant.) I don't know the next time I will have meaningful-to-me sex. (Casual sex is not, by definition, devoid of meaning, but I tend to prefer some sexual acts--namely intercourse--to be within the confines of commitment for maximum meaningfulness. I am going to try to work on being expansive about this, though. Maybe.) And, despite all the well-intentioned affirmations from my friends, I also don't know if I'll ever find someone else. Sure, sure, other men exist who likely pass my dealbreakers and then possess the next few things on the desireables list, and it is possible these men would also be interested in me, but some people end up alone. And that's ok. And maybe one will be me. And that might have to be ok, and if that's how it goes, I'll embrace it. But it's not my preference, because I enjoy partnership and romantic love. Of course, I could meet a(nother) man of my dreams and he could get hit by a bus. Obviously. But anytime a longish-term romantic pairing ends, the likelihood of being alone goes back to being higher than it was before it ended. Eat up, cats.

Basically, because the previous Plan is no longer, all four areas of my life that matter--career, community, friendship, partnership--are simultaneously up in the air. (Ok, of course health matters. But that strikes me as different.) If even one or two of the four were more stable, it might feel less overwhelming, but interconnectedness is the name of the game at the moment, and it's a lot. I realize, naturally, that these things are perhaps minor compared to the alterations faced in other people's Plans. Death or serious injury/illness of a spouse, your child being diagnosed with a terminal illness, job loss, or Mother Nature related catastrophes are certainly more complex and weighted more heavily than my own desires to live in a funky place with a job I like and friends and a partner. I get that. Yet as someone who Likes to Plan, all of these Known Unknowns are testing the limits of my emotional faculties, especially when coupled (ahem) with the crushing disappointment of The Death of the Other Plan. It requires a different kind of resolve to say "ok, here is the situation I am in for the next nine months and how I should handle it" than it does to say "ok, here is the situation for the next nine months that I am trying to change but can only partially control for the outcome given the nature of the situation itself." As The Dude said, "lotta ins, lotta outs, lotts what-have-yous...lotta strands to keep in my head, man."

I can only do so much, here, but I'm doing it. I can approach this new found untetheredness with a sense of expansion and pro-action; I can work through not only my aforementioned issues of loss and relationship bullshit but also my approach to things like uncertainty; and, as I've written about before, I can honor my limitations until my flexibility arrives.

And, if nothing else, at least I've got death and taxes.