Technology Is Your Worst Enemy Post-Breakup

Posted on 6/2/2013

Written by Jo Piazza

In my new novel, Love Rehab: A Novel in Twelve Steps, a group of women form a support group to help them get over bad breakups and shitty behavior in relationships. One of the hard and fast rules of Love Rehab is “Stay the hell away from Facebook!”

Here’s the truth: A woman’s worst enemy in the hours, days and weeks after a painful breakup isn’t another woman—it’s her laptop and smartphone.

Her ex-boyfriend’s green GChat dot still appears on the left side of her email every morning at 9 am sharp. Before, that light used to be welcoming. It was a vehicle to say “Hey,” “I love you,” or “My officemate wore paisley pants today…again.” Now it glows like Gatsby’s green light on Daisy Buchanan’s pier. Every moment she glances at it is a moment filled with the emptiness of not talking to him.

Instagram is a temptress. It becomes the gateway drug to actual stalking, as it shows a former paramour’s location in real time.

Sure she can block him, but that won’t solve all her new single girl woes. And it takes an incredible amount of willpower to actually go through and delete him from each social account.

There’s the Facebook feed, littered with pictures of happily married friends and their adorable babies, taunting her every time she loads the page. She doesn’t want to scroll through other people’s lives, but out of habit she does, then feels immediately more lonely and vaguely pathetic.

SEE ALSO: Unplugging On Valentine’s Day

The only solution is to start with a complete and total tech detox. I am talking a full week cleanse. It’s like a juice cleanse, but instead of revitalizing the liver and the nervous system, it clears out that rubber band ball of angst roiling the gut post-breakup.

“But I need technology for work!” you are thinking right now. Fair.

Limit yourself to work-only technology. Use a program like Anti-Social whenever you can to keep you off of the Internet except when completely necessary to complete a work-related task. Have a friend change your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram passwords for you. You don’t have to do this alone.

Sign out of Google Chat. Remove your social networking applications from your phone completely.

If you can manage it for work, take a break from your phone. Put it in a drawer. This isn’t just to keep you from shooting off a drunken missive to your ex telling him that you:

Still love him
Think he should really do something about his man boobs
Kidnapped his dog

This is to help create a glorious side effect of detoxing from technology post breakup—helping you to feel more present in your new life. Technology can be a crutch. You need to feel the here and the now. That includes a lot of pain, but it can also include a lot of joy.

So what happens after a week? Maybe you’ll be jonesing to express yourself in 140 characters, desperate to snap photos of your crème brulee to share it with strangers. Or maybe you will feel strangely and pleasantly refreshed.

The trick here, as with any cleanse, is to avoid slinking back into bad habits. There is nothing wrong with removing an ex from all social media and chat mechanisms. It isn’t rude. It is just common sense. The easiest way to do this is have a friend remove your ex while you are on a detox. That way it’s like he was magically deported to ex-boyfriend island while you were getting a tune up.

Sure, powering down is terrifying, but you deserve to find yourself, post-him, and that only exists offline.

Meet Jo

Jo Piazza is the Executive News Director of print and digital content for In Touch Weekly and Life & Style Weekly. Her journalism has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Glamour, New York magazine, and the Huffington Post. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Columbia School of Journalism, Piazza is also the author of Celebrity, Inc.: How Famous People Make Money. Love Rehab is her first novel. She lives in Manhattan with her giant dog.

Comments

comments