It's Not Okay: Turning Heartbreak into Happily Never After (17 page)

“Nice ride,” I said to him as I examined the backseat.

“Thanks.”

The fact that I was engaged to a man whose car I’d never seen, let alone his driving skills, was not lost on me. It was weird, and it was only going to get weirder. We arrived at his apartment, and I walked inside for the very first time. It was definitely a bachelor pad, but I figured we could fix that. We spent the next few weeks holed up in his place, cooking, watching movies, and being smitten with one another. Everything was perfect. We were going to make it—or so I thought.

Lesson learned:
All good things must come to an end.

I
think I need a restraining order. Against myself. Seriously, I wish I were back in my ancient middle school days when my chunky Nokia phone was mainly used as a fashion accessory (bedazzled pink cover, of course) and to pass the time in math class playing snake (in black and white). This breakup would be so much easier if I didn’t have a smartphone with every social media app ready to torture me at my very fingertips. It’s been twenty-three days, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look at Number Twenty-Six’s profiles on a daily basis. I don’t know why I do it to myself, considering it sends numbness running through my body every time I type his name in the search box and wait in anticipation for what will inevitably be a soul-crushing post. There are really only two possible outcomes: He posts nothing, which will leave me wondering what he’s doing instead of posting, or he posts something, at which point I will see that his smile is getting brighter and he is clearly moving on much faster than I am.

The worst of all platforms has got to be Instagram. It’s amazing how many hours I can waste using this app, but when it comes to the effect it has on a depressed single chick like myself, those hours go from entertaining to grueling. Last time I checked, nobody was posting photos of themselves with a hangover or eating sesame chicken while sobbing, or lying in a bed alone with puffy eyes and a red nose (not that I know anyone who’s ever done that . . .). But you never see the real moments in people’s lives, just the fabulous ones that show off their amazing lives, with their amazing boyfriends, on amazing holidays together. How amazingly nauseating! And having been that girl not so long ago, I now realize just how annoying my posts must have been for all the single chicks out there. If it makes them feel better, they should know that karma has come back around to me, and it’s a bitch.

Despite knowing that nothing good will come of my psychotic stalking sessions, I still put myself through the hell of viewing not just his, but everyone’s fabulous life. And as I scroll through my own Instagram posts from the past, I see those nauseating moments I shared with the world when we were actually happy, which often convinced me to stay in my not-so-happy relationship. I can see the genuine joy in my smile, the love I had for him in my eyes, and the pictures bring me back to memories that are now dead. But something keeps me holding on to them still. Something keeps me from erasing not just the photos on my feed but also the memories in my mind.

Today is no different. I’ve spent the better half of the morning stalking. I decide, in an effort to take a break and distract myself, to play a little Candy Crush. That lasts all of twenty minutes. It’s such bullshit that they make you wait twenty-four hours for more lives if you won’t pay for the upgrade. I think of other things to do, but as usual my curiosity about what my ex-fiancé is up to gets the best of me. I want to know who he’s following and how much he’s upped his selfie game in an effort to show the world that he is happy and single, but at the same time I want to resist the urge to stalk him, I really do. I’m scrolling through apps for other distractions when I come across the yellow icon for Snapchat, which I had forgotten even existed on my phone. I downloaded it only so the two of us could send stupid pointless photos to one another, as is evident by my dismal My Friends list, which consists of seven people.

I click on the yellow box, and as the home page comes up I see his name. Shit. I know I shouldn’t click on, it but I have no self-control.

WTF? Who the fuck is this hussy? And that hussy? I don’t know for sure they’re hussies, but I assume. I go into madwoman mode and start a full-blown social media stalk session. I’ve always been a snoop, I admit it. I can’t help it, I have to know the answer to things. Sure, it’s gotten me into a shit load of trouble in the past, but nobody has to know I’m doing this, right? It takes me less than a minute to nail down who these usernames belong to . . . Chicks! Blonde chicks. Blonde “model” chicks. Both are now following him on Twitter, and he is following both of them back along with a bevy of other blonde chicks. FML.

With 99 percent of my dignity completely gone, I do the only thing I can think of to salvage the remaining 1 percent. I place my finger on the yellow Snapchat icon, hold it for three seconds, and click on the X that pops up. Yes, I’m sure I want to delete. I’m sure I want to delete all of it. Now, if only it was so easy to delete him as well.

Oh, wait . . . I can! If I can delete Snapchat, then why can’t I delete every other form of social media, including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (or as my grandmother likes to call it, “the Tweeter”) that I’m admittedly addicted to. I decide to take a closer look at his Twitter account, since clearly he’s been active enough to follow those blonde hussies. I find myself at his main page and there I notice the Follows You icon is missing. This must be a mistake. I must have missed the first time I checked. I click on who he’s following, scroll down the list, and don’t see my name. I scroll through again.

Motherfucker! He’s already unfollowed me. What the hell? I mean seriously, how immature can you be to unfollow your own ex-fiancée for the entire world to see? Fuck that! You wanna play that game, playa? Okay, let’s play.

The funny thing is, he would shit himself if I had done this to him. I get that it’s a little different now that we’ve broken up, but this is a man who was obsessed and controlling when it came to social media and whom I followed and what I posted. So many little arguments came out of these damn platforms. If I didn’t post a “Man Crush Monday” of him, he’d get upset. If I posted a “Throwback Thursday” of my friends instead of us, he’d find it suspect. God, and don’t even get me started on Twitter. That one could spawn a whole different fight.

Like that one time I followed another guy while we were engaged. You would have thought an atomic bomb had dropped. I blame it all on Nikki—well, kind of. I had met Nikki on the first season with Number One, whom she actually ended up with in the end. I guess some would say she was the winner, but we all knew she had just gotten hit by the bullet the rest of us were lucky to dodge. Their relationship didn’t work out, but our friendship did. She remains one of my best friends to this day. So one night or day, I don’t even remember, she’s telling me about some hot new country singer she’s obsessed with. And by obsessed, I mean this girl would drive to any of this guy’s concerts within a two-hundred-mile radius, plus she swore on her life that one day they would get married and in all likelihood had posters of him hanging above her bed. But, hey, if anyone could marry a country superstar she had never met, it was Nikki, the tall blonde bombshell who was a charming pediatric nurse by day and wore daisy dukes better than Jessica Simpson by night. So to make this marriage happen, I followed him on Twitter in an attempt to get his attention. Thanks to my completely undeserved “verified” status, which came with a cute little check mark next to my name, he would automatically get notified that I was following him, at which point, according to our plan, I would message him, introduce him to Nikki, and if all went well, be attending their wedding within a year. I’m pretty sure this delusional plan was hatched over some cocktails, and I say that because it wasn’t until weeks later that I even remembered I had followed him in the first place. And I remembered only because one evening at home, as I was folding laundry, Number Twenty-Six accusingly asked, “Why are you following a country singer on Twitter?”

“Huh?” I responded.

“I’m just wondering why you would be following a country singer, seeing as you are engaged.”

“I am?”

“Oh, please, you don’t know who you follow?”

I scurried to my phone and logged on to my Twitter account, clicked on Following, and was reminded of that cocktail-infused night. Shit!

“Oh, yeah, I followed him because Nikki is obsessed with him and I’m trying to set them up.”

He glared at me and asked, “Why are you so defensive if you’re innocent?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, innocent people don’t have to defend themselves like you are right now, just saying.”

Oh no, he fucking didn’t! Not only did this make absolutely zero sense, but hot damn, did he just go lawyer on me? I should have let it go, but instead I lawyered him right back. While he argued that I was lying, I argued that it was clearly so insignificant that I truly didn’t remember following the guy. It wasn’t the first time I had used this trick for my friends, and it wasn’t going to be the last, and I’m pretty sure, if I remember correctly, the singer never followed me back and I never got to set them up. (Sucks for me, because I would have been single by the wedding and he might have had hot groomsmen.)

But I guess now all bets are off. He can not only follow whomever he wants, but he can also unfollow me. I suppose all’s fair in love and war. Hah! This guy has no idea who he’s dealing with. I must respond. But I can’t simply unfollow him. No, that’s the obvious retaliatory move. It’s way too easy. I need to step it up a notch.

Enter . . . Instagram! Oh, yeah, all those photos I had posted of the two of us so blissfully in love, those photos that I’ve been too sad and mortified to take down, well, guess what? BYE! I start with one, and damn it feels good. I delete another, and another, until I find that I’ve deleted five. I debate whether to just bite the bullet and delete all of them, but I know people will notice. I find myself at war with the public’s perception and my own personal conquest. I compromise and decide five will do for now. Maybe I should give him a slow burn and delete them day by day until there is no more trace of a love that has died. Ahhh fuck it! Seeing his face on my account is poisonous and I quite frankly am ready to rid myself of him and everything associated with the couple we once were. I’m past the tears, past the negative feelings, now I’m onto purging him from my life forever. And just like that, I delete every single photo.

I’m in the midst of what I’d like to consider a detox. And by now, I hope you are too. You’ve successfully found your way out of the mounds of tissues and tears, so what’s next? The clean up! You’ve felt the grief and sadness along with the anger associated with your breakup. Your body is literally a giant tank filled with emotions, and they need to be released. Enter, the breakup detox.

Yes, that’s right, your breakup is just like one big detox. I know, you’re probably thinking,
but those suck!
I agree, but I never said breakups didn’t suck. Trust me, I’ve tried my fair share of detoxes. There was that one where all I could drink was a disgusting concoction of water, lemon, grapefruit, and cayenne pepper; another which consisted of eating only raw foods. Hell, I even tried to go vegan once, after J. Lo did an interview saying that’s how she got her rocking body. Needless to say, I failed miserably at each of them. I made it hours on the juice, one whole day on the raw foods and about two weeks on the vegan diet before giving up and saying, “Fuck this!” But had I stuck with it, I’m pretty sure I could have overcome the initial days of torture, and I’d probably have a six pack instead of a three-inch pooch.

I bet I’m not alone in my unsuccessful attempts to detox. The reason we throw in the towel is largely due to how bad the concoctions taste, but also because we don’t care enough to stick it out. But your breakup is different. Not only do we care about cleansing ourselves of this shitty breakup, but we
need
to.

So how do you compare a breakup to a detox? Well for starters, they both look disgusting. The sight of a sad glass of brown liquid is almost as bad as the sight of a lonely single girl crying in bed alone with snot dripping from her chafed nose. Almost. They also both involve phases. You’ve got the pre-detox phase, which consists of you ingesting various toxins and countless calories doing Lord knows what to your body, or in the case of a breakup, all the resentment, regret, irritability, and sheer hatred you feel. Next up it’s the cleanse phase, where you rid your body of the toxins, followed by the balance phase in which you implement healthy nutrients to supplement the toxins you’ve said goodbye to. Until finally you find yourself in the adaptation phase, where you will have hopefully dropped a few pounds, but also found a new, healthy way of living so you never have to do this again.