Love in the Time of Facebook

Facebook I think it’s time I quit you.


When the ex and I broke up we remained facebook friends… for a while… and I resisted the urge to spend hours looking at his photos or seeing what he was up to. Until it just became too much that the new love in his life commented on his every… single... status...

(ed note: I hate treacle, I have fallen head over heels for a man who makes me smile so much my cheeks hurt and I still cringe a bit that there are photos of us on facebook, so this is not a judgment on her overzealous commentary, it is a judgment on my stone cold charcoal heart)

But I’ve digressed. We hit that point, I de-friended. I needed to stop seeing eveidence of his happy new life in my newsfeed.  Hard to move on when you're being smacked with it every day.  I left our photos until he told me that he could no longer be my friend (in real-life folks, obviously the facebook de-friending was what did us in, because if it’s happening on facebook…) and was blaming the whole break-up on me. I hung up the phone and spent the next three hours untagging and deleting every photo of him and of us. Why? I didn’t want him to beat me to the punch and be the one left in a million photos with just myself tagged. And it felt strangely cathartic, nine years of my life erased in just three hours of work. (ok and countless hours of therapy)

And I’ve stayed away for the most part. I am trying to keep on the middle way, not wildly swinging from high to low (yes it has been a tough few weeks for that).

I wish him peace and happiness, but I know that if he even occupies one pinhole of space in my heart it will soon bloom like a mold on a damp summer day.


And I simply cannot.


And today I logged on to facebook and there he was, in my news feed; because mutual friends had commented on his page.

And for a minute I got caught up, I looked at photos and caught my breath at his face. After ten years of following his illness through his looks, (he would very rarely share when he was unwell) I know, and I don’t want to know. While I wish him health with all my might, he is not mine to worry about.

I read his status updates and felt a tinge of rage in my heart that he told me he did not have the money to take the cat and yet he spent two weeks in Yosemite.

I felt tears sting my eyes at his utter disregard for the strain (financial and emotionally) that he has left with me.



And then I began to breathe again. This pain is temporary. Tonight I will be wrapped up in the arms of the cute boy and we will once again spend hours talking about nothing and everything. I will smile and my heart will be so full in a bed with my three loves. And this won’t matter. Because truly; nothing is happening. And no matter how it feels in this moment, this pain is not knowingly caused by him.

And I smile and close his page with a silent wish for him to be well and to live with ease..  and so I heal and I carry on and I do the same.




But facebook, seriously, not freaking cool….