‘Ottawa’ Learn From the Mistakes of My Post-Breakup Social Media Detox
For one week, I quit cyber-creeping.
Fine, I’ll back up a step. Let it be permanently known, in the annals of the easily searchable Internet, I once, out of youthful indiscretion, “creeped” the World Wide Web.
To me, this was never an issue. I see Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as an ecosystem of mutually nourishing connections. Memes give my mundane Mondays meaning. I can feel less guilty about not checking in with family for weeks at a time because they at least know I’m eating well from the looks of my Instagrammed salad. Social media is a beautiful thing — but, one day, I wanted nothing to do with it.
It all started when, five days before moving in with my boyfriend, he and I called it quits. Naturally, it happened at a wedding (open bar, vows encompassing one’s lifetime).
My ex belongs to a curious sector of millennials who don’t have Facebook. Instead, he opts for Twitter. Over the course of our relationship, I couldn’t help but read into his tweets, feeling there were “subtweets” about our arguments. To add insult to injury, I scrutinized every person he followed, wondering if they were someone a respectable professional and/or committed man would follow.
I could have asked him, sure. But because I covertly obtained this information, I feared bringing it up lest I be accused (quite accurately) of creeping.
And so, after our breakup, I knew what I had to do: block him on Twitter.
The medium, for me, was like having a superpower and, like many gifted fictional characters, I had come to learn this gift could be a curse. For once, I didn’t want to know what was on my ex-boyfriend’s mind, or comb through our tweets from better times. I just wanted to heal without the 140-character assault of nostalgia eroding what flimsy progress I made.
And, by kicking the creeping, I realized that many of the misunderstandings in our relationship had been because of the knowledge, however unreliable, I’d gleaned from his tweets — knowledge I’d burdened myself with. Instead of coming to me, he would take to Twitter. Instead of coming to him, I would parse his tweets for subtext. Our lack of communication and the passive-aggressive way we had dealt with our frustrations had rendered our relationship doomed from the start.
However, in taking this one-week no-creeping experiment further, I had avoided not only my ex, but also the social media accounts of friends. And I did miss the multimedia experience of connecting with people who I didn’t wish to quit: the illustrated updates of my friends’ meals (“I’ve perfected the tri-berry smoothie!”), Soundcloud links to someone’s hour-long take on The Hateful Eight and photos of my proliferating clan’s pink little newborns.
Cyber-creeping isn’t always a pleasant journey, but it is always life-affirming. Without lifelines like my lifestyle bible, Instagram, I found it hard to launch my butt from bed to barbell bench because I felt alone in my struggles to be healthier. I found that I mostly creep to get out of my head and affirm my shared journeys with others.
My colleague suggested something curious and a bit extreme that I want to leave you with: have a mutual agreement with your partner to block each other’s social media accounts. It’s an insane idea.
And it just might be crazy enough to work.