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.
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