We Can Stay Friends
You break up with someone and the first thing you want to do—even before the crying, the drunk texting, the replaying of conversations—is erase them from every corner of the internet. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, email, Discord, that app you both had for finding restaurants. Delete the friendship, block them, unfollow, mute, block again on a different platform you forgot you both used. The impulse is pure and immediate: if I can’t have you, you don’t get to see me.
My parents broke up. They never saw each other again. They might’ve passed on the street somewhere and not known it. Breakups used to have a clean ending because geography was doing the work for you. Now we’ve voluntarily stitched ourselves into each other’s digital lives—connected on everything, tagged in photos, appearing in each other’s feeds whether we like it or not. So when it ends, you don’t just break up. You have to go through and systematically delete them, click by click, notification by notification, account by account. It should feel like reclaiming your life. Instead it feels like a breakup that never ends.
And here’s the thing: you’re doing it partly out of self-protection, sure. But also—let’s be honest—you’re doing it because you want them to notice. You want them to see the absence and feel it the way you feel it. You want them to care that you’re gone. You watch their profile for three days hoping they’ll try to add you back, and when they don’t, that’s somehow worse than if they’d fought you on it. It’s theater. You’re both performing for an audience of one, and you’re both pretending not to notice the other person’s performance.
I’ve done this. I’ve blocked people on things I didn’t even know we were connected on. I’ve created fake accounts to check if they checked me. I’ve done the worst version of this: spent three months pretending I was over it while checking their Instagram weekly and trying to convince myself I was being realistic about whether they were dating that person I saw in their stories. The person who looks pathetic isn’t the one moving on. It’s me, still verifying that they’re actually gone.
Then there’s the thing people always say: We can stay friends.
Nobody means it, but everybody says it. You’re both already dead to each other. The idea that you’re going to have a mature friendship is a lie you tell because the alternative—actually finishing something and letting it go completely—is somehow harder. So you stay in this gray zone. Unfollowed but not blocked, where you can accidentally see their life without them seeing yours. And you never, ever actually stay friends.
The smart move, supposedly, is to just block them and be done with it. Make it final. But then you feel cruel, like you’re the one who couldn’t handle a civilized ending. So you unblock them. And then three weeks later you’re back to hating their new relationship, so you block them again. Now you’re just some unhinged person toggling them on and off like they’re a light switch, which probably is worse than any of the other options.
I don’t know what the answer is anymore. Block them and look unhinged. Stay connected and torture yourself. Keep them around and watch them get on with their life while pretending you’re both adults about it. None of it feels right. Maybe that’s the thing now—breakups don’t end. They just shift into a different format. You’re both still checking, still caring, still tied to each other’s digital ghosts. And the only difference between now and when we had to run into exes at the grocery store is that now we can haunt each other endlessly without ever having to look away.