Future Sex: Zombie Love and My Forty-Eight Facebook Exes

The other night I was reading Lorrie Moore's excellent short story, Wings, in the current spring issue of the Paris Review and came across this quote: "You could lose someone a little but they would still roam the earth. The end of love was one big zombie movie." This idea arrested me, mostly because I like zombies, but then I thought, “Yeah, she's right.” All our past loves are out there somewhere, lost to us but still roaming around. The relationships are over, but we're never quite free of our feelings for them; they persist, undead, these weird figments from our past.

Last week in Future Sex I answered questions from readers on love and technology. One woman, Cat, wrote in wondering if she ought to defriend her recent ex-boyfriend on Facebook and I assured her it was the right thing to do. But as the week went by, I paused to think about how well I've taken my own advice. How many zombies of romances-past lurk on my unwieldy Facebook friend list?

Social media, at its best, connects us to the people in our lives in new ways. It offers us a way to maintain contact with those who, whether due to physical distance or packed schedules, we don't get to see very often. I don't often "prune" my Facebook friends list, and now that the social networking site has been around for a while – I joined almost seven-and-a-half years ago — it's beginning to serve another purpose: a strange, dusty tomb containing all my past relationships.

In the interest of the common good, I undertook an experiment that I wouldn't necessarily recommend. I went through my entire friends list and counted every person on it whom I have dated. Now, seven-and-a-half years are a long time, and the "exes" on my friends list originate from all eras in my life. So I defined "dated" a bit loosely, depending upon the context. In high school, I defined it to mean that we had entered into a verbal contract to "go out" with each other. In college, that we had gone somewhere, like a party, together and there were some weird romancey-vibes and we kissed on the mouth. In my very sophisticated adult life, that we actually went on at least one "date" where it was obvious to both parties that a romantic date was being undertaken.

Apparently, I have "dated" forty-eight of my Facebook friends. As I paged down my friends list, further and further, writing another tic mark down as I recognized each person, I became a bit disconcerted. What were you all doing here collecting cobwebs in my Internet memory box? What purpose was it serving to preserve all those relationships— some fleeting, some defining – in this Internet facsimile of closeness? Out of those forty-eight, four are now married, one is engaged, one had a newborn child visible in his profile picture so I assume he's had a baby (I did not click on all their profiles because even I am not willing to sustain that amount of emotional trauma for an Internet column), and one died two years ago.

Sure, I have old friends gathering dust too, people I haven't spoken to in years: my old organic chemistry lab partner, even my little sister's ex-boyfriend. The difference is, that while I probably wouldn't think twice about severing any of the aforementioned connections, I couldn't bring myself to do that to my own distant past exes. I still stand behind my advice to Cat. I think we should unfriend our exes when the wound is fresh, when we might accidentally have a couple glasses of wine and click on their profile "just to see what they're up to." Obsessing about a recent breakup is bad for everyone, and Facebook only facilitates that obsession. Sure, I don't actually communicate with most of the people I dated, but could someday, right?

When Michonne, sword-wielding heroine of The Walking Dead comics, loses her boyfriend to the zombie disease, does she just throw him out to wander with the other zombies? No, she puts him on a chain and leads him around like a pet. While this is a nerd reference (and also a spoiler if you haven't read the comic books) it fits nicely into our analogy.

Social media is still evolving. Its place in our lives changes as we create a history within the sites themselves. Think about Facebook's introduction of the Timeline feature. Our interactions are now broken into years; time is running parallel to our user experience. Facebook isn't just a place to meet new friends and share information; it now visually mimics the passage of time. It's a live rendering of our current interests, but also a time capsule and a scrapbook. Deleting the people I've dated would be like tearing up a picture of your ex; except this picture grows and changes and says annoying things and gets married and moves to Zurich.

Some research suggests that remaining friends with exes fosters dissatisfaction in current relationships. A backwards gaze detracts from the present. Social media is also increasingly implicated in divorces. The promise of different and better things can cause disillusionment with what we've got. Maybe this is this psychological impact of a life lived in concert with social media: nicely stacked nostalgia behind us and lots of shining possibilities before us.

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