Social media: causing codependency.

I woke up, pissed as all hell. It was a Saturday morning, I’d slept in, and for some reason I was in a fit of rage.

I was mad at the guy I’d been talking to, mainly because we weren’t really talking to each other anymore.

Six months prior to this ugly Saturday morning, I would have woken up to a sweet text message from him, or a video on SnapChat.

But after finally sleeping with him, he’d gone dark without much of an explanation.

The thing is, this has happened to me so many times, I’ve nearly come to expect it. I get it, no one wants to have a “break up” talk with someone they’re not really dating.

However, if the guy had no interest in me, then why was he still looking at all my SnapChats and mentioning things he’d seen on my Instagram? It made my stomach churn. It felt creepy.

I recently started following Life Coach Brenden Dilley on Twitter after hearing him on a radio interview. He said one of the first things you should do when parting ways in a relationship is, what I like to call, the Digital Delete.

Get rid of pictures of your ex on your phone, old text messages, and delete the person from all social media channels.

According to Dilley, we’re living in a society that’s codependent, so removing our exes or past flings in every capacity, makes it real that it’s over.

If we weren’t talking in our actual, non-digital lives, then I sure as hell wasn’t going to let this guy check up on me online. And I didn’t need to be checking out him, either. It was over.

So, I deleted our connections on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and SnapChat. And of course, I changed his name in my phone to “Fuck Boy”.

He tried to add me back on SnapChat, to which I responded by blocking him and telling him to stop contacting me via social media.

A few weeks later, this guy told me I was immature for doing this (he actually asked me if I was 12 years old).

If I was indeed 12, that makes him a sexual predator, and actually, social media wasn’t around when we were 12. But I suppose that wasn’t his point.

Perhaps I am immature, but in any case, I did it because I wanted him out of my life in every way possible.

And I would venture to admit that I was wishing for a bit of control in a situation that left me clueless, and hurt.

So, do we live in a codependent society? It sounds so terrible, but maybe we are. I do think that social media has made us more lonely than we were before it arrived, and it does have the power to affect our relationships.

I was reading an interview with author Kim Stoll in Time magazine, and she said social media has given us all gateways to contact people from our past that may not be good for us.

Interestingly enough, that’s how I reconnected with this last guy. We went to high school together and started talking via SnapChat (God, that sounds so cheap when I write it).

I’d bet that if social media didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have reconnected. Just saying.

But since deleting him from social media, I do feel rather free. Pay no mind to the fact that all of my social media feeds are public, and I have a revealing blog.

It’s less about visibility and more about the cold, hard fact that we are no longer connected, emotionally, or digitally.