You can probably relate to my story. Social media’s faux-connectedness gives us the ability to stay loosely tethered to people we care about, but not so much that we want to hang out with them in real life. The friends from high school, the people with whom you’ve briefly crossed paths, the occasional former co-worker. On the same side of that coin, because it’s so easy — just a quick tap of “follow” — we often end up staying linked to people with whom we don’t want a meaningful relationship with offline, or no longer can have. It seems like an unspoken rule of the social media age: you amass followers and become one yourself, and barring betrayal or death, those digital connections stay intact.

I stayed “friends” with my ex on social media because to do otherwise felt taboo. We ended things amicably, and unfollowing him felt overly dramatic — somehow worse than his many transgressions during the relationship.

So instead I became the digital equivalent of the “cool girl” as I tiptoed around other fun tropes like “hysterical woman” or “crazy ex-girlfriend.” I was “cool” when he started casually posting pictures of the new girl and forced myself to stay “cool” when things got, as I surmised, significantly more serious. (See: seafood buffet.)

Photo by Viviana Rishe on Unsplash

It didn’t help that he continued to dole out likes on my posts, which made it all feel so friendly. Each “like” seemed capable of alleviating his past sins, as if one little digital affirmation could say, “we’re good, right?”

But trying to pretend things were still “good” on my end was at odds with watching his new relationship unfurl before me. Every photo they posted together made my skin crawl but I willed myself to adjust. “It’s just how it is,” I told myself.

I not only started resenting this woman who had done absolutely nothing to me (and in fact seemed perfectly nice) but stayed invested in their new life together, becoming a sort of creepy, cyber third-wheel. And through comparing all the ways I was not her, my relationship with him — which obviously ended offline — continued. I was trying to get over him while subjecting myself to constant imagery of him with not-me, our once-real-relationship now reduced to its digital half-life, lingering but dying nonetheless.