The next time you’re tempted to show your ex how totally over your breakup you are by posting pictures on Facebook that show you frolicking on the beach with a new suitor, hold off.
Putting on a brave face after a split is nothing new. However, in these social-media-savvy days, people are putting that face online, and it’s not doing anyone much good.
“Staying connected with your exes on social media and bombarding them with a false sense of ‘happy’ or ‘sexy’ selfies is becoming a popular cultural phenomenon,” says Kris Ruby, the social media expert for the Ruby Media Group. “After a breakup, people are increasingly feeling more pressure to make it look like they are doing great on their social media accounts.”
But, she cautions, “I don’t think someone would see a photo of their ex Jet Skiing and think they made the wrong decision about the breakup . . . I strongly feel it always has the opposite effect.”
It can, however, succeed in hurting a past lover and diminishing what you had with them in the first place.
“It makes someone think you moved on faster than they did, and that the relationship wasn’t as meaningful to you as it was to them,” Ruby says.
Amanda Chatel, a 36-year-old blogger from the East Village, definitely fell victim to the trend. After her 2012 breakup, she felt a huge impetus to show her former flame that she was great.
“I hate to admit it, but I actually started my Instagram account to prove to my ex I was fine,” she says. “Oh, look at me being fine in Paris. Oh, now I’m fine in Barcelona. Oh, I’m so fine on this yacht in Lake Como. These aren’t tears. These are splashes of Champagne on my face as I celebrate how fine I am.”
It didn’t make her ex want to jump on a plane to be with her, but he took notice. “He’d occasionally send a drunken e-mail . . . acknowledging something I’d posted,” she recalls.
But it didn’t necessarily make her feel good. “I felt both sad and sort of satisfied that he was falling into my trap. I’d set up that Instagram for him, and voilà, there he was responding! But then I’d remember we were broken up and get shaky and cry.”
Courtney Boyd Myers, 29, the founder of audience.io, a digital marketing company, says that her ex’s reaction was also negative.
“In the early days after my recent breakup, I was sad but would only post happy things,” says Boyd Myers, a Williamsburg resident who ended a four-year relationship last April. “This angered him because he was seeing this upset side of me when no one else was.”
Rather than posting photos of the amazing summer you’re having with a new boyfriend or girlfriend (or someone you just met on Tinder) to show your ex that you have moved on, Ruby says the smartest strategy for all parties is to unfriend one another on Facebook, Instagram and the like. That’s the easiest way to really move on.
“In order to grieve and truly move on you need that time of separation, which includes social media separation as well,” she says.
“When you have finally moved on, you can refriend them.”