It's been a week since your relationship ended. You see that your ex has liked another person's Instagram picture and posted a picture of himself out at a party-- it makes you feel both sad and angry. Would it be better to just unfollow him once and for all?
Many of the articles about unfriending or unfollowing your ex on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram prescribe rules and should’s: You should shut your ex out to get your ex back (link is external). You should unfriend your ex to move on (link is external). You should stop using social media to heal faster.
But the truth is that studies haven’t proven that disconnecting with your ex online will necessarily make the breakup easier. A 2012 study (link is external) of 464 young Facebook users, with an average age of 21 and primarily women (84%), found that staying friends with an ex on Facebook was associated with a more difficult emotional recovery from the breakup and less personal growth. However, the big caveat is that this study does not prove causation, only association—that is, remaining friends on Facebook does not necessarily lead to a more difficult post-breakup period or lessen the ability to move on. It is equally possible that people who tend to experience more difficult breakups are more likely to stay friends with their ex online.
These articles that say you must unfriend or that you should do it in order to get your ex back miss a deeper, more fundamental point—that a critical part of recovering and navigating the aftermath of a breakup is focusing on and figuring out what is right for you (and not for the sake of making an impact on your ex, your ex’s new partner, or for anyone else for that matter).
In my opinion, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to whether you should defriend or unfollow your ex because every relationship has a different story that can change over time, and every individual has a unique and authentic way of being and responding. Even how you feel toward the breakup can vary during breakup, one week, one month, or one year later. Perhaps at the beginning of the breakup, you want to achieve more separation by disconnecting online with your ex, but maybe a year later, whether or not you’re friends online may not have a huge impact on your life either way. What matters is that each moment along the way your decisions are truly your own, and that each step brings you closer to what you need.
During periods of loss and hurt, you would think that our minds would naturally offer ourselves more compassion and empowerment. But often break-ups are processed as failures and can spur questions about the past or future like: What did I do wrong? How could I have prevented this? How could I have not seen this coming? How can I get my ex back? Can someone else tell me what I should or shouldn’t do to make this right again?
But, especially if the breakup was not your decision, you have already just been through the pain of having someone else decide for you what is right for your life, and you may feel like you did not have your voice heard or that you lost some sense of control over your own direction. It's ok to take a moment to pause and give yourself the space and time to figure out what you need.
This can be a very challenging shift for many people. The realization that you have the power to decide what is right for you--to offer yourself compassion, kindness, trust to decide-- might seem remote and almost impossible. More often than not, for a lot of people, it is more familiar to beat yourself up about the past or worry about the future.
Here are five questions to help connect with what you need and then to help you decide if unfollowing/ unfriending your ex online makes sense for you.
1. What do I need?
I put this question first because it’s truly important to spend time to explore what it means for you. You might find that you have different needs at different times during the breakup and afterwards. It is really easy to forget that what you need for yourself should be the driving force behind your path.
Most of the time, the decision about whether to unfollow your ex online is actually a decision about yourself and what you need. Do you need more distance, privacy, or boundaries? Do you need more understanding of what happened? Or do you need more friendship or reassurance that you will still be part of each other’s lives? Do you need to keep your connection in order to keep a part of your past alive?
2. Why do I want to disconnect from my ex online? What would I be getting out of staying connected online? Will defriending or unfollowing my ex get me closer to or further from what I need?
If you are feeling like you need more distance from your ex, will defriending your ex get you more separation? If you feel like you need more understanding of what happened, will staying friends to be able to look at your ex’s profile bring you the information that you seek? And with that information, would you be getting closer to the closure you wish for?
3. What does unfriending/unfollowing my ex mean to me? Am I trying to communicate something? If so, are there other ways of arriving at my destination that do not involve social media?
Maybe you’re afraid that your ex will unfriend or unfollow you first, so you decide you need to react preemptively. Or perhaps you are frustrated that your ex isn’t answering your texts or emails anymore, and you want to show your ex you're angry.
It can be more effective to be direct in expressing your emotions in a conversation with your ex instead. Using unfriending/unfollowing as a way to signal being upset or angry can lead to more waiting and more frustration if you feel like they don’t get your point.
4. What is getting in the way of what I need?
Often there are barriers towards moving forward. Have you decided you need more separation, but you can't hit unfollow because it feels permanent? Is it difficult to let go of the last sense of being included in your ex’s life? Perhaps you hesitate to take that step because you still want to see what your ex is doing or that you want to check if your ex has moved on. Ask yourself, do these barriers keep you from getting closer to what you really want? Are you fulfilling your needs in the big picture or just satisfying a short term curiosity that feeds the hurt?
5. How do I feel after my decision?
It’s helpful to continue to keep tabs on how you feel after your decision. Is it working in the way that you hoped? You might find that time changes what you need. If you thought you wanted to block your ex but decide later you don’t want you, you can change that. You’re allowed to change your mind.
In the aftermath of a breakup, it can be difficult to figure out exactly what you need. By letting yourself figure it out over time without self-judgment, you can be back on the path towards personal growth and groundedness—whether or not your ex stays in your Twitter feed or not.
credit:psychologytoday
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