I open my Tinder and scroll through matches, looking for one of my oldest ones. I finally reach my ex from over a year ago. I ignore our messages, with the last line getting his phone number, and I go straight to his profile. My goal is to find the number next to the mapping icon. I am seeing if he accomplished his dream of moving to LA. The number says 2,516. He did it. I can stop checking once a month, and finally get over him.
In a time when you don’t have to “accidentally” run into your ex to catch up with them, the processes of getting over someone has completely altered. Sex and the City once declared the “scientific” formula of getting over your ex as half the time the relationship lasted. But when people check their ex’s social media feeds, it seems like we will never get over our past lovers. Now that we are hyper-connected, we find ourselves in times of desperation where we use the savviest techniques to solve mysteries of people who are no longer in our lives. Here are some stories of what Smithies have done to uncover details of their exes.
After a passionate summer of love, one Smithie came back to school realizing she was blocked on Instagram. She refused to let go of someone she fell in love with that fast. Now she occasionally looks at the tagged photos of her ex-lover’s current girlfriend to see if he shows up. He often does, and she can see the extravagant events they go to.
Another Smithie has sworn off Twitter, but only continues to use it to keep up with her old girlfriend. While this Smithie doesn’t have a Twitter account of her own, she remembers the Twitter handle of her ex. She frequently checks it to see what her ex’s newest opinions are, and compares them to her own, often either coming to the conclusion that her own opinions are inadequate, or that her ex is crazy.
This next Smithie e-stalks an ex all the way back from high school. Being blocked from all social media platforms post-break up, this person goes on Venmo, getting snippets of her ex’s life through small transactions of single pieces of pizza and split uber rides. On hearing this story, another Smithie immediately responded, “Of course I blocked my ex on Venmo.” The e-stalker’s highschool sweetheart clearly did not get the memo.
There is the classic checking your ex’s spotify history – I even frequently look at a boy I went out with in high school’s top Kanye songs playlist – but this Smithie took this common practice to an extreme. For the week after a breakup, this Smithie tracked as their ex listened to different songs on Spotify and made lists of every song they listened to. They looked up the lyrics to the songs and tried to interpret the meaning of songs to see the secret messages their ex was leaving for them. Maybe one song means “I still love you”, and another means “I’m sorry.” They offered to show me the lists and wanted me to help interpret the sequences of songs.
My last subject had a boy from Tinder he dated for two weeks. After the breakup, he later found out that his ex’s cousin went to Smith. He immediately went to the Smith Moodle website and tried to find her. E-stalking old classes he was in, he found the she was in one of his classes.
In our world today we get into intense relationships formed online, many from Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge. They evolve to e-stalking each other on instagram and texting for hours, eventually going on dates to cafes or parks. The lucky may fall in love and create deep emotional bonds. All to end up just the way they began; by trying to find snippets of information about these people through small posts online. This relationship cycle of our generation may seem completely different to dating in the past, but it is quite similar to how it always has been, where you meet people through the grapevine and once you break up you find small details of that person through anecdotes and glances out of the corner of your eye. It is a natural human instinct to want to know what people we once loved are up to, and while the methods of finding this information is new, the practice is as old as dating.
