The temptation to continue to creep on your ex over the Internet is nearly universal. One study found that 88 percent of those who continued to have access to their ex’s Facebook page said they sometimes monitored their ex’s activities, while 70 percent of people who had disconnected from an ex admitted to trying to spy on the ex’s page by other means, such as through a friend’s account.
Many people we talked to advocated a complete “unfriending” on all accounts, but others thought those kinds of social media plays created drama in and of themselves. Even if you do unfriend or unfollow, though, it’s hard to avoid your exes. As one person told us: “It gets complicated the longer you had a relationship with them. Can you block them on Facebook? Sure. But you have the same friends, or at least befriended her friends on Facebook. You’re going to see them doing the same stuff via pictures that your friends post.”
Some people have gotten pretty creative about how to solve the problem of the social media ex. One nineteen-year-old girl from Toronto named Cassandra Photoshopped pictures of Beyoncé over her ex-boyfriend’s face and put them up on Tumblr.
“If imagining yourself at your happiest with Beyoncé doesn’t help, I don’t know what will,” she told BuzzFeed.8
I personally have thought about this strategy and decided that other celebrities might be good as well.
Ladies, trouble getting over your man? Why not Photoshop in The Transporter himself, Jason Statham?
Fellas, does it make you sad to have those vacation photos of you and your lady in Hawaii? What if instead you were in Hawaii with the funnest dude ever: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson?
Ladies, are you sad when you look back on that romantic dinner with your ex who left you for your best friend? What if that wasn’t a romantic dinner but a stimulating conversation with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor?
Even if neither you nor your partner is being tempted to use social media to facilitate cheating—since we all know how easy it is—there is another trend that is seeping into modern relationships: snooping.
SNOOPING
If social media makes it easier to cheat, there’s no question that it makes it a lot easier to get caught. Every interaction with someone online creates part of a digital paper trail.
This digital paper trail and the knowledge that our partners have this secret world in their phones can lead to what we will refer to as “snooping.”
Here’s a tip: As you read this section, when the word “snooping” comes up, read it in your head with a quiet, sneaky, Aziz whisper voice. It’ll make the section more fun. Try it now. Snooping . . . See?
Both in our in-person focus groups and on the subreddit, many people discussed how secretly viewing their partner’s texts, e-mails, and social media led to their finding incriminating evidence that made them angry and sometimes even ended the relationship.
“I broke up with a girl because of a text I had seen on her phone,” someone recounted. “We were in bed and she got up to go to use the bathroom. After a few moments I heard her phone vibrate on the bed. It was a text. On the lock screen was a text from her ex-boyfriend that said something along the lines of ‘Are you coming over again tonight?’”
“My ex and I both got into a bad pattern of checking each others phones and it lead [sic] to a lot of trust break downs,” said one gentleman on Reddit. “Most of the time there was nothing at all to hide, but before the last fight I found out she had been lying to me about going to a Bible Study and instead going to spend time with a guy she met at that Bible Study.”
And no, it wasn’t her new best friend, Jesus Christ.
So there you have it, readers, if your boyfriend or girlfriend says they are out at Bible study—they are more likely out boning someone from Bible study.
Even in instances where someone snooped and didn’t find evidence of cheating, the act of going through your partner’s phone can create its own problems. In seeking to make sure that your partner is being faithful, you may inadvertently breach his or her trust.
In our interviews people on the other end of snooping had varying feelings about being snooped on. Some didn’t care, because they had nothing to hide anyway. Many subscribed to the theory that if you leave your accounts logged on, it’s fair game. But others believed that looking at your partner’s screen is a violation of trust or that it reveals underlying jealousy issues. Some even said it was grounds to end a relationship.
One thing that stuck with me, though, was that whether or not your partner is actually cheating, these suspicions and the snooping that follows can boil into full-blown paranoia that drives you mad.
Snooping . . . (Are you still doing the voice? Just checking!)