Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do (14 page)

• • •

When I was modeling, I was represented by a top agency (which was also an acting agency) that also represented some very famous celebrities (I was not one of them). Every so often, a great party would come up with a sponsor or organization that wanted some big names at their event for the press to write up. The biggest celebrities barely went, but the smaller ones (like me) went often (free drinks, great music, and a red carpet that we hoped would heighten our popularity—win-win-win!). Usually the assistants would send out the party invites and BCC the entire list of talent (you never know when SJP or Jennifer Lawrence might decide to randomly grace your party, and that is a big win—it’s worth a shot). The e-mail would go out to thousands of people: talent, other agents, publicists, and of course press. One sad Sunday, however, one of the assistants at the agency forgot the most important part of the e-mail: to BCC. I remember sitting at my dining room table, opening up the e-mail, and suddenly having the personal e-mail addresses
of everyone from Lindsay Lohan (think 2006) to Ben Affleck to Sandra Bullock to three of the Knicks to the entire Trump family! I never ended up doing anything with the list (though sometimes when I see one of their e-mails in my contact list I send them an invite to something like my dog’s first birthday party just because I think it’s funny), but I imagine some of the people on that list (ahem, members of the press) might have found it quite useful. Needless to say, the assistant was fired immediately, just minutes after her fingers touched “Send.”

• • •

My friend Kelly dated a guy for five years after college. They had a relatively healthy relationship, albeit a tumultuous breakup. Not tumultuous in a Brenda kind of way but more the type of torrid love that just can’t sustain itself, which almost always leads to drama and heartbreak. After they were unable to make a clean break, Kelly and her boyfriend finally decided that they would stop talking. It gutted them to do so, but it was the only way either of them could move on.

A few weeks later, Kelly started feeling anxious and panicked that her boyfriend had moved on (she never thought he actually would) and was dating someone else. While she was generally an extremely strong-willed person, the desire to check his Facebook was just too much to bear. So, she signed on and checked. His most recent update was surprisingly depressing. His grandfather had just died and he had posted a photo of him. She felt bad for him. She wanted to
reach out and knew at some point she would, but later on, when someone actually gave her the news. She didn’t want her ex to know she had been perusing his page, obsessing. She clicked to scroll down the page to see what else he’d posted. Click she did, but on the wrong
part
of the page. She clicked “like.” Kelly had just “liked” her ex’s grandfather’s death.
Kelly likes this post
. Ugh. She tried to undo it but knew the notification would still pop up on her ex-boyfriend’s phone and he would know that she liked the post. Not only would he know she liked the post, but he would know she was stalking his Facebook page. Panicked, she called him immediately but there was no answer. She was insecure and defeated; the last few weeks of being “strong” were erased and it was all because of Facebook.

• • •

My friend Clare landed a job the summer before we graduated college at a top NYC law firm. It was an extremely prestigious program that only accepted 5 percent of its applicants. She excelled through the summer and had even been comfortable enough there to come out and tell her coworkers and fellow interns (there were two hundred in all) that she was gay. During the course of the summer, she also managed to find another lesbian in the program—we’ll call her Susie—who was out as well. They became great friends and even shared their respective crushes on the hot and successful female lawyers who were mentors and role models for the interns. Clare and Susie joked constantly about their schoolgirl crushes on Abby, an especially powerful
lawyer, who mentored Susie. As the summer was coming to a close, the interns sent around a mass e-mail about what great present they could give Abby to thank her for being such a great mentor: gift certificates, Kiehl’s baskets, even an amazing Balenciaga purse. Clare and Susie maintained their own e-mail correspondence joking about taking Abby out to dinner one-on-one on a date or buying her an apartment and cooking dinner for her there. Susie had replied-all to the two-hundred-person intern mass e-mail chain that perhaps a gift certificate for a dinner for two to Per Se might be a nice idea so that she could take her husband or friend or whomever she wished. People responded, liking the idea, and the conversation moved on to how they would split the purchase. Clare, aiming to get some laughs out of Susie, replied to Susie’s e-mail, intending it to go
only
to Susie, saying something about wanting to be Abby’s dinner date and hoping to make Abby fall in love with her, and then said some other, um, explicit things that aren’t quite appropriate for this publication. About ten seconds after she hit “Send,” Clare’s phone was buzzing. Susie was calling. Confused, Clare picked up. She could only make out the term
reply-all
before Clare realized what she had done. She had sent her schoolgirl-crush fantasy about Abby to the entire group. She had replied-all instead of replying to just Susie. Before long, she was called into an HR office (of course one of her fellow interns had ratted her out—how else do you get ahead!?) and her summer was terminated one week early.

• • •

My friend Tina had just started hooking up with a new guy. She was excited! But she was also twenty-two at the time and was falling victim to frequent drunk (and very late-night) texting. The lucky guy’s name was Jack, and while the relationship was far from serious, she liked hanging out with him (usually between eleven
P.M
. and three
A.M
.). One night around one
A.M
. she was feeling especially anxious to see Jack, and in order to entice him (in case he was home or didn’t feel like going out) she wrote some rather racy text messages, hoping that it would be enough to get him to come see her. After an embarrassing twenty-five-minute waiting time, a text came through. It read: “Tina. Stop booty calling your forty-year-old married COUSIN Jack. Seriously this has happened several times now. I’m sure Jack is great but I’m certainly not him. Change one of our names in your phone, please.” Tina was mortified. She quickly learned from that experience to always include last names with family members and lovers so as not to write inappropriate texts to people, namely our parents and family.

• • •

One of my colleagues, Erin, played volleyball at college. For years, her team felt mismanaged and somewhat mistreated by their coach. By Erin’s sophomore year, the seniors on the team decided it made sense to send an e-mail out to the team discussing the best way to stand up for themselves and all of the terrible things their coach had done. At the end of the e-mail, the seniors asked each person on the team to write back an example of the type of behavior or a specific
experience they wished to address with the coach. E-mails were fired back and forth about everyone’s worst experiences and what they hated most about their coach. Apparently, one tiny mistake occurred during the e-mail transaction. The coach’s name was Carrie Walsh, similar (too similar) to one of the players, Carrie Wallace. In one of the seniors’ haste, her Gmail auto-filled the “To:” field with “Carrie Walsh” (the coach!). Twenty-six e-mails later, the entire team realized that they had just been sending scathing e-mails about their coach
to
their coach. The next day, Coach Walsh called a meeting with the entire team. She made the seniors read aloud all of the e-mails and effectively stopped the team from being able to meet with the athletic director or take the matter any further. It was a terrible start to another terrible season.

• • •

One person’s devastating humiliation is another person’s chuckles. It’s all LOL until it happens to you, and then sometimes it takes years of deep therapy and repentance before you can even crack a half smile about your embarrassing Internet fiasco. No matter how careful you are, no one is immune to digital mistakes and snafus. And when we’re texting and e-mailing and posting 24/7, it’s hard to keep in mind that once you post something on the Internet or send something to someone else’s phone, it lives forever—and is completely out of your control. Including incriminating photos, drunken texts, and poorly thought-out tweets.

Of course I can’t deny the fact that these things can also
be good. We can get in touch with old friends. We can meet significant others. We can share videos of puppies singing and playing the piano. Worldwide awareness of current events and new developments in the world of art grow and social movements and political agendas gain momentum. We can rally together in the name of what we think is right. The Arab Spring started because of a tweet; LGBT kids all over the country got stronger and braver because of a YouTube campaign called It Gets Better.

But for every one of those connective and electrifying movements, there’s a deep well of humiliation waiting to be stumbled into and a load of mindless, unimportant drivel that steals our attention and distracts us from what is real—and when I say
real
, I mean where you are sitting or standing right now, where you exist. Your actual real life.

S
o that breakup story I mentioned . . .

Well, one morning a few years ago, I sat on a plane bound for Los Angeles. I was relaxed. I had spent the previous night with Tracy, my girlfriend, and despite some rough spots in the previous months, things were good.

I opened up my laptop and accessed my e-mail and was surprised to find nothing from her—no message wishing me a good flight or sending her love, which she would usually send without fail. I sent her an e-mail, expecting a quick reply in return. Four minutes passed. No response. Around the fifteen-minute mark, panic set in. I wrote a note to my friend and roommate Kelly and asked her to check up on Tracy by sending her a text and seeing if she read it. She kindly did as I asked while I waited, thousands of feet in the air.

About fifteen minutes later, an e-mail from Tracy popped onto my screen. That fateful moment will haunt me (and my Gmail inbox) forever. Tracy hadn’t written anything, only forwarded a recent (intoxicated) e-mail conversation that I’d had with my ex-girlfriend (
see:
Brenda, from previous chapters), in which we lamented that we missed each other and “wished we could go back to the beginning.” Brenda and I had been in touch sporadically since our breakup, and there were obvious romantic overtones to this e-mail chain. You see, Brenda and I would decide to stop speaking for a period of time. Our lives would go back to normal and everyone would be happy until one of us hinted at missing the other via Facebook, Twitter, Friendster (it was still a thing then!), or a Gchat status. By “in touch sporadically” I mean that we were not actually speaking or texting much at all but consistently stalking each other and sending subliminal messages via social media. Brenda and I had been in one of our out-of-touch stages for nine months or so until about a week before my flight. I was in a bar with friends and on a bathroom line, I decided to check my Twitter feed. There it was, glaring in my face: “BrendaDC: Even if you were a million miles away, I could still feel you in my bed . . .” A lyric from “Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart” by Alicia Keys—it was a song we’d both listened to during our out-of-touch periods, and it always reminded us of each other. My heart sank. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to ignore it. When I got home, I posted a video by the same artist on my Facebook page. This could mean one and only one thing to Brenda: I missed her too and I wanted to talk. Two days
later we were e-mailing again. Three days later I forwarded the entire e-mail conversation to my roommate Kelly, begging for advice, or maybe just so I could admit my wrongdoing to
someone
, albeit not to the person I should have. I had forwarded it to her because I just needed to share it with someone. I felt terrible. Of course, Tracy had opened Kelly’s computer to check her own e-mail, and as my luck would have it, Kelly’s e-mail was open and Tracy was able to see my entire e-mail exchange with Brenda. There I was, thirty-seven thousand feet off the ground, realizing that an e-mail I had written while inebriated to an ex-girlfriend that had been inspired by a tweet followed by a Facebook status had cost me my relationship.

One of the many things I could not get past, and part of what motivated me to write this book, was that I knew I would not have made the same mistake—I would
not
have contacted a former girlfriend—had smartphones and social networking sites not granted me an easy way to act on a dangerous and damaging impulse. I was to blame, I was guilty, but Facebook, Twitter, my iPhone, and e-mail were my accomplices.

Recently there was a little meme that went around Instagram and Facebook that said: “If you think your relationship is real, just trade phones for a day. No Passwords. 90% of you will be single again.” This little provocation got so much heat because it’s true that our phones are where we live out a lot of our private lives. And they are filled with temptation. So no matter how much a person intends to stay faithful, the combination of fantasy, impulse, and
accessibility (and sometimes booze) keeps the e-cheating train moving. I once heard that couples should always keep “locks” or “passwords” on their phones so that the urge to check up on each other could not be indulged. I come from another school of thought. My wife and I never once put a lock on either of our phones. Sure, in the beginning of our relationship, we both broke down a few times, asked to see texts, or checked up on each other, but to this day neither of us keeps secrets from each other. It just isn’t worth it (and I would like to think that when you find the person to spend your life with, you won’t have any secrets, though perhaps this is naïve). After some time, we didn’t feel the urge to check each other’s phones anymore. Because, you know, we grew to trust each other. Sure, maybe we got to the trusting place in a strange way, but it’s a 2014 kind of way, and it worked. From my past experiences, however, and from talking to my friends and family, I think our open-phone policy may have been in the 1 percent.