Breaking up is hard to do. Really. It’s a song title for a reason.
My former boyfriend and I were together for nearly three years before I ended the relationship about a year and a half ago. We kept talking for another month until I cut off all communications one day after a fight.
For the last little bit of our relationship, he lived in California while I lived in DC and much of our relationship happened online. He’d email me in the middle of the night while I was sleeping and I’d email him in the morning when I woke up. Then, on those rare occasions when we were both sitting at our respective computers at the same time, we’d gchat for hours.
At that point, I was barely on Facebook (only checking it when someone friended me which rarely happens because I’m highly unsearchable), didn’t have a MySpace profile, and Twitter wasn’t big yet.
A friend in New York was on tour with a band and offered her two-week sublet to me so I took the opportunity to go on a vacation. While on vacation, I wound up finding a job and an apartment and uprooted my life from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. to Brooklyn.
Just a few months later (then the height of the economic crisis until about a month later when it got worse again), I got laid off. When I was laid off in April, I really got back into social media… mostly because I finally had the time to.
I also saw rebuilding my personal brand as an opportunity to get a job in social media and I slowly started joining/rejoining various social networks that I hadn’t kept up with in years. Most of the social media platforms have features in which you can import contacts from your email and quickly have a large list of followers before you even get started. This is excellent for people looking for a lot of their friends to new online network. However, this is not so excellent for people who haven’t talked to their boyfriends in 9 months.
When I joined Twitter, he was the first person recommended to me based on my email records. I also regularly get friendly “reminders” to join his network on LinkedIn or become his friend on Facebook because we have multiple mutual friends. Now that Facebook has expanded beyond college students, I’m getting this with a lot of friends from high school and middle school as well.
I’m not really sure how to make this stop … other than to email friends constantly to make them appear at the top of my “suggested friends” list whenever I join a new social network or block him from every social media platform I join. All I know is, when Neil Sedaka wrote “Breaking up is Hard to Do,” I don’t think he envisioned just how difficult it might become in the future.
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