Millennials have a whole new set of circumstances when it comes to dealing with their exes. It’s mostly because of the fact that technology means that huge blocks of your past live on forever.
Most of us who have gone through breakups are familiar with the social media purge we need to go through immediately following a breakup. Clearing your phones’ gallery folders is a good bet, and if you have cloud backups enabled, you should make it a point to clean those as well. Some of my friends (as well as myself) are all too familiar with the pangs of regret and nostalgia that comes upon discovering old photos with former significant others in Google Photos.
The Eleventy Billion Types of Exes
There are all kinds of exes. There’s the ex we hate with all of our hearts, and the ex we try to be on civil terms with. There’s the ex who still likes your posts on Facebook, far too often than you are comfortable with, and then there’s the one you run into when on Tinder.
There’s the ex who still shares your Netflix account, partly because you are still too lazy to change your password, and partly because you get a perverse thrill out of following what shows and flicks they are into nowadays.
Is she still into Brooklyn Nine Nine? Has she watched more of Mad Men than you did, and does that make you mad, because it’s something you used to do together?
There’s the ex who you feel smug about, secure in the knowledge that you have won, and then there’s the one who makes you feel the reverse, who landed on their feet much better than you did. Isn’t it funny that we feel the pressure to win breakups nowadays? But it’s natural, I suppose, when you take into account how public some relationships can be.
Texting Our Exes
Assuming that your breakup wasn’t nuclear, keeping in touch with your ex can be a delicate rope balancing act. Depending on how intensely you still feel about the person, following their social media activities can be too exhausting. It’s better instead to use more closed means of communications, such as Gchat, WhatsApp, or emails. And then there’s, of course, texting, which is best avoided. We are well aware of the dreaded 2 AM texts, and even worse, some of us are guilty of participating in it.
There’s often an unspoken endurance contest that takes place when you maintain contact with an ex.
There is this perverse expectation where we wait for the other party to slip up and reveal that they are still hurting. I remember once, when we were talking, that we briefly discussed our dating lives, and we danced around that elephant in the room. That wasn’t fun.
Texting is difficult because there are a lot of minefields we can momentarily forget. Emails are better because they allow a longer form of communication, a better way to air our grievances since we aren’t waiting for the other person to react (or blow up) while we compose our messages. It can also lead to tragic mishaps.
One millennial, in a series of email exchanges with her ex, drafted two versions of a goodbye email. In one version, she politely asked him to mail her less frequently and wished him well on his life. In the other, she tore her ex a new one. She would often return to it and revise it, before opting to delete it two months later. Unfortunately, she found out three months later that she had sent it instead.
Stalking Our Exes
Research reveals that we are weirdly masochistic: 4 in 5 millennials cyber-stalk their exes. I understand the urge, and I am just as guilty of it as anyone else. Many of us go one step further and go through old texts, which is the kind of stupid activity that precedes drunk texting your ex at 2 AM. But I understand, that for some, cyber-stalking our exes isn’t just about reliving past memories, but also about finding out what kind of lives they are living these days. Have their sense of humor changed, or their taste in music? Have they finally picked up that one book they have put off for the last couple of years? Who are the new people in their lives? What kind of people are they saying? Are they facsimiles of us- and if they are, does that vindicate or disappoint us?
It’s abundantly clear that we have a lot of questions we want to ask our exes, but usually can’t. One particularly clever and enterprising individual bypassed the troubles of asking someone in person or via text, instead creating an exit survey for people she dates both casually and seriously. It’s a delightful (and also funny) series of questions that are quite self aware, and even concludes with asking whether the person would recommend the surveyor to a friend. That’s an idea that I am probably going to steal for my next breakup.
Letting Go of Our Exes
If you would rather automate the process of cutting your virtual ties with your exes, you can use a couple of aps and plugins. Killswitch is a paid app that removes nearly all traces of you and your ex from Facebook by itself. Eternal Sunshine is a Chrome plugin that blocks mentions of your ex on your newsfeed. Block Your Ex goes on step further and blocks your ex from all social media platform. Perhaps the best, however, is Ex Lover Blocker, which publicly shames you on Facebook if you try to call your ex.
Who are we kidding though? Some of us would still rather stalk our exes’ profiles and peek into their Instagrams, or flirt with the idea of sending them a message on Snapchat.
Some of us are still editing those notes we started writing months ago, while peeking into the best hits collection of texts that make our hearts sink to the depths of the Marianas Trench.
I wish we wouldn’t look for our exes in our current partners, and hope that they would be as into our pet hobbies as the other person was, or feel uneasy with someone who treats us well, always half expecting to be greeted with the familiar cold shoulder- or even outright contempt- we received from the ones who came before.
I wish we wouldn’t want the wrong things, but then again, some of us are fucked that way. And we wouldn’t have it otherwise.
