Breaking up virtually
Unlike before, couples have to also deal with a break-up online
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2015-07-01 01:28 GMT
Hyderabad: Britney Spears’ recent high-profile split with Charlie Ebersol, a TV producer, saw the singer deleting all posts and photos featuring her ex from her social media forums. She then went onto unfriend him on Facebook and unfollow him on Twitter and Instagram. Life after a break-up is doubly hard in the age of social media. Gone are the days when you erased someone from your life by just deleting a phone number.
You log into Facebook and there are happy pictures of her. You log into Instagram and she has posted a selfie, with an old friend of hers you’ve always suspected she had a crush on. You log into Twitter and she’s subtweeting (indirectly referring to someone on twitter without mentioning them) negative stuff about you. And, you’re practically stalking her online hoping she hasn’t moved on. Hoping she isn’t happy. Hoping she has turned ugly overnight.
The choice is to remove traces of your past love lives altogether that remind you of your ex or live with it by looking at it as a memory of a different time, as opposed to one of pain. But things are easier said than done.
“Everyone wants an amicable and peaceful break-up and to continue being friends but it rarely happens the way we want it to. You can be in denial but eventually you have a reaction. You’re always trying to find out what she’s up to. You end up spending more time staring at her social media profile than your own. It’s always harder for the person who didn’t’ make the decision to break-up so the least the other person can do is to not parade their life on social media and keep it on the low-key enabling the other person to recuperate,” says Sarathlal K., a banker from Kerala.
For many, an immediate reaction to a break-up is to paint a happy picture on social media in order to rub salt into the wounds of the other person. This can be extremely unhelpful to both the partners and makes it that much harder to move on. If both choose to remain friends on social media, the best way would be to keep social media activity to a bare minimum for a temporary period till both slowly come to terms with the separation.
Actor Isha Talwar agrees it’s important to stay away. “After you’ve been committed and intimate with someone it’s imperative to maintain a distance so that you can recover. One must try to keep the break-up amicable and by communicating with your ex, you can keep it civil. Social media platforms and WhatsApp are a part of everyone’s lives and you can cut off people only so much, so it’s best to live and let live.”