Earlier today, someone I'm friends with posted this article to one of their social media accounts. It's all about how members of the social media generation can keep up - and apparently frequently choose to keep up, with their exes. I know that a lot of other members of my generation do choose to do this, but I don't understand why.
Ultimately, exes are exes for a reason. I think most people, immediately after a break-up, go through a period where they can't think about cutting their ex out of their life completely. I know I sure have, in past relationships. When you care about someone, it's hard to stop overnight. But as time goes on, eventually, I would expect that the majority of people would not want to keep up with their exes - or at least not with many of them. There are certain situations where I could understand having a way to keep in touch with an ex, but I feel like those are likely to be few and far between.
For example, I currently have one person that I consider an ex friended on one of my social media accounts. We dated for a very short period of time when we were young teens, but since we were both in a special program for "advanced" students in our school, we were stuck together - with the same group of people - from third grade through tenth, both long before and long after we were a couple. The fact that we were ever together is pretty insignificant to our history; the group of kids we were thrown together with was more like a family then anything. It's kind of uncomfortable to think about the fact that we were ever involved, because looking back, it feels vaguely incestual. Needless to say, I don't believe either of us think of our brief involvement as anything particularly noteworthy or important. We have each other friended because the program we were in created a unique kinship between everyone in it; even those of us who weren't friends or didn't like each other had to get along, and we all bore witness to the trials and tribulations of all of us growing up. We were forcibly connected to each other for almost half of our lives, and so we know each other better than almost anyone else. Even if our connections are now more tenuous, it's not so easy to just completely forget them.
All of my other exes were pretty much written out of my life as soon as I was over the relationship enough to remind myself that it was the healthiest thing to do. Why cling to a relationship with someone that it didn't work out with? Sure, at some point you cared about them, but why waste your energy and emotions continuing to do so when that clearly isn't going to get you anywhere? Why prevent yourself from moving forward by keeping yourself tied to someone? I mean, it's great if you guys had a great friendship first and/or a totally amicable break-up because you genuinely like each other but agree you definitely aren't meant to be together. But why would anyone choose to remain connected to someone who didn't want to be with them, who they didn't want to be with, who didn't treat them right, who they didn't care much about to begin with, or who didn't care much about them to begin with? What in the world is the purpose of remaining connected to someone that was just a fling or who you only casually dated for a few weeks or who had no regard for your feelings?
Do you have exes friended on social media?
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