Hi Friends on Facebook and Friends in Life,

Remember back in the day when a relationship you were in ended…you would stay home; slouch on your couch, eat a bucket of ice cream and watch endless amounts of television.  Then your best friend would call you right before you could overdose on junk food and say all the right things to cheer you up and get you out of the house and on with your life.  Remember when deleting the persons name from your phone and ripping up their photos signified the end of your relationship.  Ahhh those were the good old days!  Post break up work was minimal, you could get rid of all evidence of your past relationship in an afternoon.  Today post-break up work is endless!  Depending on the length of the relationship you were in, you may want to consider hiring an assistant to help you finish off your relationship.

With the wave of the Internet and the inflation of social networks, post break up now requires a lot of unforeseeable post-administrative work.  Back in the day you used to be able to delete your ex’s phone number, lay on your couch and fall asleep with melted ice cream on your chest in front of your TV.  And the next morning you could wake up fresh as a new you, with a new attitude.  Nowadays the second you break up you have turn on your computer and do all the necessary social updates to forget about your ex.

First you have to login to your Facebook account, the nucleus of social exchange.  To begin your relationship cleanse you must block and then delete (un-friend) your Ex-Lover.  Keep in mind that it’ll take you two clicks to get rid of them.  After your first click, the insensitive people at Facebook will promptly ask you if ‘you’re absolutely sure that you want to delete your Ex’.  So please be prepared to give your mouse a quick heart wrenching double click.  Unfortunately once you’ve done that your work has only just begun.  Next you’ll need to spend some time changing your privacy and account settings.  Presuming you and your Ex have mutual friends you’ll need to alter the level of access that each of them have to the information that appears on your page.  Do you remember the names of all your mutual friends…hmm probably not!  Assuming your Ex has already taken the liberty to delete or block you from their friends list, you’re going to have to spend at least 20 minutes trying to remember the names of all your shared friends.  The longer you’ve been in the relationship with the person, the longer it’s going to take you to remember the names of all your common friends.  Then you have to change your relationship status, this will be hard because you loved seeing it say that you were in a relationship with ___________and now you’re single and looking for men/men/both.  Since you’re probably in a state of complete misery, you forget to realize that when you change your relationship status, all of your friends, colleagues and acquaintances see the change appear on your wall.  “Woah!  So and so is single now?!”  Instantly people will feel sorry for you and people will judge you.  Now you’ll have to reply to countless pity messages in your facebook inbox.  Hopefully no one will be rude enough to write a comment on your wall under your status.  Next part to tackle in your Facebook account is your photo albums!  Do you erase the photos of you and your Ex or do you leave them and try to ignore them when searching for a new profile picture.  Is it that simple?  Do you just untag yourself and go on in life knowing that your face is all over the net with your ex that cheated on you this many times or maybe you cheated on them, who knows?  Then you run the risk of being asked about the photos if they ever reappear.  It’s inevitable your future lover will look you up on Facebook or gain access to your account and find the most romantic photos of you and your Ex?  And when that happens they’ll ask you about them during a quiet dinner at home.  The conversation will sound something like this, “So babe, have you ever gone to Europe?” you’ll think about it for a second while chewing your food “nope, why?”  Your lover will check for you to look to the left, which means your lieing.  “Oh nothing, I just wanted to know if you’ve ever gone before.”  You’ll look at them confused and say, “you just wanna know if I’ve ever gone…would you like to go?”  Unable to read you they’ll say “well I wouldn’t want to go somewhere that you’ve already been, like if you’ve been to Belgium and already visited the world famous chocolate factory, I wouldn’t wanna make you go and do that again!”  Confusion fills your brain once you realize that your new lovers voice went up an octave.  “Well I’d be more than happy to go to Europe with you, I’ve never been to Belgium…I’ve only ever been to the imitation Belgium chocolate factory downtown but that was years ago”. 

Deciding to keep or delete your photos will be a long an arduous decision process.  Overall, updating your Facebook account will take up at least the first hour of your post-break time. 

Ok, now its time to login to Twitter.  Should be easy right?  Stop following them and kazam your done?  Wrong!  Twitter is arguably worse than Facebook, it’s the ultimate vessel for venting your most up to the minute thoughts and feelings.  You won’t stop following your Ex because you want to dissect and analyze every message he/she ever posts until you can’t think any more.  Twitter is also where you’re able to throw hints at how you feel and reticently keep them in the loop of where you’ll be in town so that they can choose to run into you in the street.  For example if you post “Can’t wait! Going to the Kanye concert in a month!”  You might be really trying to say “don’t ruin my happy time by showing up at the concert, you know I’m going…I just tweeted it!  So just don’t show up and we’ll both be happy.  You could go to the next Kanye concert, I’m sure he’ll be on tour for his next album in the fall”.  Or if your still in your life, that tweet can mean “that’s where I’ll be at Kanye’s concert, I just bought the tickets and I have one left, please call me and ask me about the concert so that I could invite you and we could kiss and make up”.  Twitter can be where you get closure or where you start things up again.  Whatever you do try not to get in a Twitter war.  Those are always ugly and difficult for the rest of us to understand. #RThttp://@jerk…what does that even mean?

Flickr, whether or not you had a joint flickr account with your ex you’ll have to change your password, that actually goes for everything!  When you’re in a relationship you don’t care if the person you love sees you type in your password because you trust them but when things are done you have to gain back your privacy.  So going back to the start of this post-breakup administrative to-do-list, pencil in ‘change ALL passwords and password hints to everything!  That includes social network sites, bank accounts, email accounts, everything. 

In your flickr account you’re met with the decision to get rid of photographs that hold precious memories of good times in your relationship.  You transfer all of your photos to your hard drive before deleting your flickr account because you think for a second about the slight possibility of getting back together wit your Ex.  And you figure that if you don’t get back together you could always use photoshop to them out.  Which brings me to my next point, gone are the days when you would rip up a photograph and let off some steam.  These days everything is digital, which makes it that much harder to get rid of photos.  When you drop things in the trash on your computer you have to then delete your trash which requires you to think twice about things instead of just going ‘riiiiip..we’re done, that’s it’ - no turning back. 

So now that you’ve updated your Facebook status, modified your Twitter account and transferred all your pictures from your Flickr account to your hard drive, you could get started on some of the old school post break up work.  If you have a black berry you’ll need to delete your Ex off your BBM, which will be really tough to achieve if you were both crackberry addicts (it’s just as hard as unfollowing your partner on Twitter).  Then you have to sort through your voicemail archive where you saved the most memorable sweet messages you’ve ever received from your ex-lover.  Then you have to delete their regular number.  Once you’re finished doing all of the computer related changes you’ll have to begin sorting through the goods you’ve collected since the start of your relationship.  Hand written love letters, t-shirts, sweaters, etc.  While you were together you accumulated a lot of stuff and now you have to give it all back.  (Sidenote: In the present and future, don’t give anyone anything you aren’t willing to say goodbye to).  If it’s a T-shirt you took you have to do laundry, or maybe you don’t wash it because you don’t care. 

If you were a gold digger or better yet a sugar mama or sugar daddy, then there’s probably a good chance that you need to send or receive back funds.  The exchange of funds, whether or not you were the one borrowing money or your ex borrowed money from you, you need to get it back so you have to either log back onto your computer and do an email money transfer or go to the bank, withdraw money and hire a good friend to drop it off at your ex’s new place.

This brings us to the most difficult post break up task…going out.  To go out means to be seen.  Luckily if you’re not a celebrity you don’t have to worry about the paparazzi catching you out when you least expect it but these days everyone is sort of a celebrity amongst their friends.  Meaning if you go out, it’s your friend that’s going to snap a picture of you doing belly shots that will end up on their Facebook wall, BBM profile pic or Twitter page. 

With all of this in mind, in the future, try not to break up when you’re knees deep in work.  Try to be considerate of the amount of time that its going to take for the opposite person to get over it.  As you could see these days you’re going to need to spend a lot of time and energy wrapping up your past relationship(s).  It’s no wonder that Tiger Woods and a slew of other celebrities have recently been getting caught for text messaging.  Think about it he couldn’t ask one of his assistants to delete the suggestive conversations on his phone as he was beginning and ending each relationship.  They just piled up and now he has to suffer the consequences (which he deserves) of being that guy who had 26 sexual relationships during his marriage.  Stay on top of your relationship, people!  Don’t let anyone tag you in photos, it’ll create less work for you in the future.  Hire an assistant you trust, i.e. your best friend to go and do all of your online post break up work for you so that you could have that moment right afterwards to binge on ice cream and catch up on the latest episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.  Instead of hitting the clubs, hit the slopes and take some new photos of yourself on top of a mountain or wherever you’re happiest and make that your new profile picture.  Although we live in a time where break ups are a lot more difficult, we also live in a time when its easier to meet more people so don’t stay in something that doesn’t work.  Give yourself a chance to love yourself and do what’s in your heart.

Your halfway to the weekend.

XO,

Lils

JUST Distracted

The Perfect Lunchtime Read is a writing series that began on January 7th, 2011.  Every weekday I write a new Perfect Lunchtime Read for you to enjoy while eating your lunch at work or taking a break from your hectic life.  Every weekday new Perfect Lunchtime Read is posted on justdistracted.com.  A notice of its arrival on the website is sent via Facebook & twitter.com/justdistracted

Every writing piece is light and easy to read, I like to leave the serious topics with the New York Times.  Warning: My writing style is no holds bar but don’t worry you won’t be seeing any NSFW photos posted anytime soon.

If you have feedback, questions or comments please feel free to email me at justdistracted@gmail.com 

To read previous Perfect Lunchtime Reads click below:

Intro - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - New Year

Entry 1 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Where to find a lover in time for Valentines

Entry 2 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Mondays

Entry 3 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - The Lotto Winner

Entry 4 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Where do men cry?

Entry 5 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Award Season

Entry 6 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Award Speeches

Entry 7 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Legal Vs. Illegal

Entry 8 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Peeping Lils

Entry 9 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Give Credit Where Credit is Due

Entry 10 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Get Silly

Entry 11 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - An Open Letter to Lauryn Hill Fans

Entry 12 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Dear A$$hole at Hibiscus

Entry 13 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Where’s your famous ex?

Entry 14 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - My Brand New Friend

Entry 15 - The Perfect Lunchtime Read - Entry 15

Hope you enjoy your lunch and thanks for reading!

Lils

JUST Distracted