A recent conversation with some of my girlfriends got me wondering… do any Dopers keep tabs on the whereabouts/accomplishments of their ex-partners? Do you think any of your exes keep tabs on you? Not in a stalkery kind of way, more in a Google- and Facebook-enabled way. If your ex is doing well, does it bother you? If you’re the one doing well, does a part of you wish a particular ex could see you now?
My ex-wife and I are Facebook friends and we exchange the occasional email. I should point out that we’ve been divorced for 30 years, which is long enough for most of the weirdness to have faded away.
Nicely put 
This also reminded me that I forgot to answer my own question. As I said to my friends at the time, yes, time is definitely a factor. I’ve been with my husband for almost 11 years and married for 8, so even my most recent ex is some distance in the past.
There’s one ex in particular whom I occasionally wish could see me now. He used to have a real hate-on for people he deemed “yuppies”, which in his view included pretty much anyone who was financially successful. He was pretty smug about how much smarter he was than them because he “had a life” while they were all just soulless workaholics. Now that I have a successful, lucrative career and am married to someone who has the same, I’ve realized two things: (1) that having a job you love that pays well is actually pretty awesome, and (2) that my husband and I are probably his worst nightmare 
People change so much; it’s kind of nice to see that. Two examples:
College sweetheart swore he never wanted to have kids. I thought his reasonings were goofy-assed, but since he was the ivory tower denizen and I was not, there really was no arguing with him. The world sucks, we’re draining resources, it’s irresponsible to have children, blah blah blah. I didn’t TELL him he’d probably change his mind later, but I thought it at him real hard. Pretty sure he has: at last glance <been a while, but still> he was NOT doing the professorship thing, and was instead working for an international aid/refugee organization on the grass-roots level in the US. I am proud of him for not turning into the snobby asshole he seemed to be on the track towards being. And if he doesn’t have kids now, I bet he’s at least adopted some. I do know he’s helping a bunch, and that makes me happy.
Another sweetie…right before college-sweetie, actually…really WAS a bit of a self-entitled,know-it-all jerk. I don’t know whether he’s really changed, but found it amusing that he seems to be going along the Tony Robbins path. Good for him, but…I suspect I still wouldn’t like him very much, lol.
Are we twins? Because you could have written my post.
I had an old girlfriend call me up 5 years after we broke up. I had dumped her very abruptly and pretty coldly and I refused her attempt to have a “with benefits” situation in a pretty mean way. But i was surprised to hear from her and curious to see what she was up to, so I agreed to meet her at a bookstore.
We talked, walked across the street and had some lunch, I said ‘well hey, it was really nice catching up’ and that was it. No “I’ll call you,” no “let’s do this again some time” no suggestion of any kind that I cared to see her again.
About a week later she called and went into some well rehearsed speech about how her life is complicated and I can’t just show up in her life out of nowhere whenever I feel like it and try to pick up where we left off like nothing ever happened. She has too much self respect for that, and she can never forget what I did, so that ship has sailed.
One of my exes is a poster here (we did not meet here, he followed me here) and he posts a ton of personal information. He’s still a creepy pig, so that’s good - I get to see what I didn’t miss out on.
My partner and I have been together almost 25 years, so my ex-relationships were so long ago, I’m sure no one cares.
I only have two exes and it’s impossible to stalk either online… things were ended amicably and I know what’s going on with both, though.
Sure I keep track of my ex’s … in two cases to avoid them; in others because we have been and still are friends :lol:
Of those I consider exes, two are my friends, and another I sort of know about him because we have friends in common (including his family and his best friends). Even if I do not ask directly about him, once in a while his name enters the conversation, usually when they run out of other things to tell me. My response is a shrug and change of subject.
I’m friends with a lot of old boyfriends.
Two I don’t stay in contact with - but are friends of friends, so I’ll hear about occasionally.
One I could care less about. When I hear of him its “oh, yeah, I dated him.” The other is my ex-husband. I hear more about him and twenty years since we’ve broken up and I’m currently mad at him because I’ve heard from several sources he is cheating on his wife (of twenty years). I’m sort of surprised that I’m not feeling glee, but instead disappointment and anger.
I didn’t date much at all - I used to be extremely shy and insecure. About 10 or 11 years ago, my very first BF tracked me down via Classmates and we reconnected with occasional emails and IMs. Nearly 40 years ago, I thought I was in love with him, altho I eventually figured out that I was in love with the idea of being in love…
He has been married 4 times, divorced 3 times, lost one wife to cancer, he’s got 5 kids, 3 of whom don’t speak to him, and I think there are at least 2 or 3 grandkids. His politics have moved *waaaaaay *to the right and somewhere along the line, he found religion, so on the rare occasions when we do IM, topics are limited or really uncomfortable. He lives 3 time zones away, so I doubt we’ll ever see each other again.
I’d love to know what became of 2 others, just out of idle curiosity, but they have relatively common names and I’m not sure where they eventually ended up living, so after an initial attempt to google them, I just gave up.
Oh, almost forgot - about a year ago, I had dinner with the guy who took me to my 8th grade graduation dance! He has a unique enough name that I found him easily when I was googling people I knew from elementary school. I don’t think he counts as an ex, tho, since we just went on the one “date” and I never saw or heard from him again till last year.
If anyone wanted to find me, they’d have it pretty easy. My maiden name is very rare and my family still lives in and around Baltimore, so someone who knew those two things about me would easily be able to call my mom, my brother, or one sister. Since no one has, I just assume no one cares. 
I only really have one official ex-boyfriend. He must have had a crisis of conscience a few years back, because he looked me up on Facebook and sent me a note apologizing for being such an immature dick back in the day.
I accepted his friend request so I could snoop a little, and it turns out that despite being older, he is no wiser, and is still acting like an immature dick. His posts are all about hot bitches, workouts, and deep hipster insights into the world, and his photos are all carefully staged to make him look bad-ass and popular. Dude, you’re thirty years old. How is “@the beach, lots of tanned titties out today” an acceptable status update?
There was no need to continue being in touch after I got that out of my system.
Six exes here.
One is a good friend.
One is a friend and he also was a bit of a project ( he needed and welcomed rescuing, I mean); I am interested in how he is nowadays. Mostly I’m interested to see he doesn’t backslide, because then I would have to call him and set him straight…
Another ex also was a kind of project. But I really couldn’t help him, and things got unpleasant, so I dropped him. I still feel guilty, and also quite sure that things won’t get pleasant again, so I don’t look him up on the web and haven’t even unblocked his e-mails.
One ex, I confess I still feel competetive. But mosly so that if I feel I’m ahead, I would like it if he read about it on the Internet. And I a feel that I’m behind, I try and hide that fact. And I don’t look him up on the internet because I don’t want to find out that I’m behind.
Two exes, I really don’t care about. I already have drawn the conclusion that I don’t like them much; reading or seeing anything about them is no different then reading about anybody else I don’t like.
One of them I sometimes hear about because he tries to be an artist and he blathers the usual art-babble on local TV. When ever I see him, I feel a bit proud (well, he is a sort of successful -local- artist and he is passionate about it) and a larger bit annoyed, because I hated that art blather then and I hate it now even more. But seeing him on TV made me look up his site to find out more and to indulge in some sweet sweet annoyance.
The phrase: “But I thought it at you real hard !” is now part of my vocabulary. Thank you.
I’m facebook friends with two of my more serious, pre-marriage exes. One I broke up with and one broke up with me. I don’t keep tabs on them necessarily, because the extent of our “facebook relationship” involves pretty mundane stuff, but I’ve seen each of them once or twice in person in the last five years or so. My romantic relationship with each of them was around 20 years ago, so whatever feelings lingered have long since dissolved. Although, I have to say that I took a little delight in hearing about the one who broke up with me, that her marriage isn’t great, the guy is a schlub, and he’s the sort of loser that she and I used to joke about when we were together. The one I broke up with ended up divorced and unhappy. That disappoints me, because even though I left her, I don’t want to see her miserable.
She left me about 25 years ago. I was going through some pictures, and found some that I thought she would like and was trying to track her down just to send her some. I mentioned this off the cuff to my cousin, and she said that she had run into her, and it appeared that she had become a crack addict. I’m very sad about that. She was a beautiful, talented person.
Not true:( they probably thought it would be extremely awkward since you’ve been out of touch for so long…
I’m not friends with any of my exe’s; almost all of my relationships have either ended in bad blood or in ambivalence and disinterest. I did have an old college girlfriend hit me up on Facebook but my wife objected and, while I disagreed with her, it wasn’t a fight worth having. I looked her up on LinkedIn a while back and was a little amused to see the goth girl with the ripped tights, black concert t-shirts, spiked jewelry and short red-dyed hair was replaced by an “average” looking woman in her 30’s wearing an oversized cashmere sweater and blonde shoulder length tresses.