When Blogs Cry: How To Breakup Online
Posted by: Melissa Gira Grant
Filed in:
relationships
11:00AM, Monday October 6th 2008
A few weeks into dating him, when it wasn’t even clear that we were doing more than falling into bed and blogging the pillow talk the morning after, he texted me to ask, “We’re not secret right?”
“Secret?” I wrote back. “Aren’t we on Flickr?”
That’s the moment when it got, as the uselessly succinct Facebook menu options put it, both “serious” and “complicated.”
Our relationship wasn’t founded simply on this trendy sort of self-disclosure: we were just reporting on our sex lives before anyone else did. It shouldn’t have shocked me, let alone the audience we gained along the way, that it’d all have to end online, too. So how do you deal with a breakup like that, without breaking up with the Internet?
Cancel, unsubscribe, unfollow. Sort out how you want to react to the breakup only after you’ve canceled the relationship, unsubscribed from her Tumblr, or blocked him from Twitter. To undo a relationship that made it online in any form—whether you’ve got photos together all over MySpace or earned your own tag on Gawker—requires investing as much shared exposure as you put in. Make a cold calculation: in my case, that meant reframing a year-and-a-half long affair, across half a dozen online networks, and doing it in just a few days. This condenses everything: how much it hurts, how fast you have to react. You had weeks or months to attach to one another’s blogs, profiles, and endearingly staged snapshots. Now you have to delete or address it all, all at once.
We live in public. Those of us who document even a small part of our lives online hit that moment when we realize our audience isn’t just our friends: they’re more like fans. Any girl whose kept a LiveJournal or posted photos of her shoes to it has felt this. In talking about your breakup, you’re addressing those “friends,” not your ex—and if your ex has an online footprint equal to or greater than yours? Take charge of your own reputation by telling your story—even if that’s to say you’re going to keep it discreet.
Focus, and cause no collateral damage. The heart’s built-in amnesia – time healing all wounds – is not going to guide your sense of judgment in an online breakup. What will give you resilience later is to tell only your own side now, even if that self-imposed silence aches. The one thing I’d take back from my breakup-blogging is a reference to the sex life of someone close to my ex. But addressing the woman who named me in her own screeds against my ex, after those became the subject of comment for our mutual friends? That not only felt fair, but necessary. In the case of involving those outside the breakup: only expose what you absolutely need to, and only about those equally desperate for the attention.
A pre-emptive makeup? The strange thing is, it really wasn’t hard to read what strangers—who had no interest in my relationship when it was going well—had to say when I was torching it in their RSS reader. It was easy, and easy to obsess on having the crowd vet “what it all meant.” By the time my ex and I reconciled – and screwed, and cried – the worst things we could’ve said to one another had already been said, in front of an audience. Their reblogged attention was gratifying just long enough for us to figure out how little we needed them to make sense of our relationship ourselves.
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Alia
wrote on October 6 2008 @ 12:07 pm: [report]
I never bothered to take my ex off of my Flickr account, and I left group photos in myspace, just removing the ones of just the two of us. It’s part of my past, so I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen. Also, I ended up losing my hard drive, and I was glad I had all those photos backed up on Flickr. Then again, we DID part on friendly terms and are still friends today, even though I have a wonderful and awesome boyfriend that I am with now. So, I feel like people who just want to obliterate any memory of the other person maybe need to consider that a failed relationship is still part of your life. If the relationship ended amicably, why delete all your blog entries about the person or fry all the photos you ever took together? Just let it move on into history. I never feel a sense of closure in destroying the representations of the relationship. The closure has to be mental.
Chris L
wrote on October 6 2008 @ 04:35 pm: [report]
The subject matter is interesting, but I find the writing in this article difficult to follow. There seem to be a lot of half-formed sentences and allusions to vague ideas or situations; more like someone’s draft notes than a finished article. Maybe I’m just being dense but I have a hard time extracting much useful information from this.
Horrified
wrote on October 6 2008 @ 04:38 pm: [report]
My god… the shallow, whiny, self-absorbed, attention-starved, emotionally needy, neurotic, narcissistic attitude on display here is truly stunning to behold. It disturbs me to learn that anyone actually thinks like this ... but why should I be surprised? One more blogger using the jaws of life to yank the twisted, mangled corpses out from the wreckage of her sad, humdrum day-to-day existence, for all the rubberneckers to see.
Lawrence
wrote on October 7 2008 @ 01:52 am: [report]
this article - is simply awesome
Viviane
wrote on October 9 2008 @ 09:08 am: [report]
Well said.
T
wrote on October 9 2008 @ 10:03 am: [report]
Impossible piece to read - obviously written to a very small targeted group of bloggers who speak in the OMG/WTF language of the barely educated.
Caracala
wrote on October 9 2008 @ 12:38 pm: [report]
This is one of the reasons I’ve kept my relationships offline. Strangely enough, even those guys who I ‘met’ online, I never announced our relationship or discussed our doings publicly. Occasionally I would mention him, but not by name. I once had my partner on the same forum as I was on and people knew we were together….but he eventually faded from there and it was all the better. Maybe I’m just not one to talk about my relationships in the first place, so dealing with the public aftermath hasn’t been a big deal before.
dataphage
wrote on October 9 2008 @ 12:54 pm: [report]
@T & @Horrified - and yet you both read it and felt moved to comment…
I’ve never had to break up online but I can see how unpleasant and awkward it can be. It’s one of those area of your life, if you put a lot of your life online, that is a lot less private. You are almost forced be a network administrator on your own life if you live a lot of it online.
David
wrote on October 9 2008 @ 02:29 pm: [report]
Incoherent. It simply does not hold together.
There’s an attempt to be witty here, insightful even, but it comes across as simply clever. Save us from clever writing. Feels like a piece you’d find on gawker along with 200 comments arguing minute.
Melissa feels like she’s talking about talking about something. Sex is very specific. Good sex is bloody detailed.
LoveHugs
wrote on October 9 2008 @ 04:18 pm: [report]
@ T and @ David:
I did not think we were critiquing the writer or how the article was written. Go past that to the actual content of the article and it is a very good one.
If all you do is see what is wrong when you read articles like this, I feel sorry for you because you must not get anything out of reading. There’s so much to learn so get down off your high horse and loosen up.
Chris L
wrote on October 9 2008 @ 05:36 pm: [report]
The differing opinions on this article may be a gender thing. My original disparaging comment was archetypally male, focused on the “difficulty extracting useful information.” As previously mentioned, I still think the subject matter is interesting, and perhaps we should treat the article as a starting point for discussion (like we’re doing) instead of an explicit how-to guide.
That said, there’s certainly a generational factor here. I came of age at a time when the web was just being born and talking to people on computers was considered the exclusive realm of social outcasts and calculator-carrying nerds (of which I was one). For me, there is still a clear distinction between online and offline relationships; online activities are not “real” to me, they’re just convenient and fun supplements to real life relationships. I would never plaster details about my love life all over the web specifically so that I would not feel pressured or stressed by the imagined opinions of unseen strangers, many of whom may have questionable ethical, emotional, or intellectual fiber in the first place.
But I suspect that younger generations, those who grew up with cell phones and five IM accounts, have completely blurred lines between the digital and analog aspects of their existence. What may look like naïveté and inexperience to older folks is completely normal and expected to the younger digerati—it’s simply the reality in which they live.
The author’s experience is likely just slightly ahead of a much larger curve, out of which, eventually, a set of implicit norms and netiquette will emerge to guide us in keeping our lives coherent and consistent across multiple social mediums. Discussions like this are the start points for developing those norms.
For example, recently a friend of mine “un-friended” one of his friends because he was not interested in the marketing spam he was receiving through multiple social media channels from that person. The unfriended individual apparently took the term quite literally and became alarmingly, and publicly, enraged at my friend, destroying a good friendship that had lasted for years.
Should my friend have discussed it with the other person before unfriending? Was the other person justified in taking such actions so personally? What if this had been a romantic relationship, does that change the rules?
Stephanie Gerson
wrote on October 10 2008 @ 01:24 am: [report]
hey now folks, this actually speaks to the observation of danah boyd, preeminent scholar on social network sites (yes, there are scholars on social network sites), that we perform our online identities based on our relationships with other people. sure, i can check your facebook info, but i’m much more interested in what’s written on your wall and who your friends are.
plus, there seems to be somewhat of an emerging phenomenon around couples who perform their relationships online: jakob & julia, hup & steph, and - ok, shamelessly - me. it would follow that couples perform their breakups online too. so, um, thanks for the performance tips, Melissa
steventc
wrote on September 26 2009 @ 08:08 am: [report]
Awesome article. Breaking up in the world of social networking can be tricky. Its pretty hard to avoid seeing photos of ex’s with common friends on facebook.