I’m FB and real life friends with my ex-fling/FWB, and we regularly text. She’s in a new relationship, so the “benefits” are on hold, but we still have a pretty deep friendship, and keep up on each others’ lives, and see each other every once in a while. We’re close enough that we’ve discussed being roommates.
My most recent ex-fiancee (Sarah) and I had a horrid break-up a couple of years ago. I abruptly ended our first attempt at being post-relationship friends (begun roughly six months after the break-up) after she began showing up at my job and admitted that she had been driving by my apartment to see if I was home. We’re on our second attempt at being friends, about a year after I ended the first attempt, and I limit it to Facebook and text message only, no more face-to-face meetings. She regularly texts/FB messages me (usually to complain about whatever guy she’s with at the moment :rolleyes:), and a few female friends have told me that she’s contacted them through FB, asking how they knew me. During our break in friendship, I checked 911 calls in her area on a weekly basis to make sure she hadn’t yet committed suicide.
Previous fiancee, Heather, sent a congratulations message last year when I went through commencement, the first time I’d even heard from her since 2006. That she was aware that it was occurring leads me to believe that she occasionally checks in on me. My FB is public, hers is private, so I have no clue what she’s up to.
Ex-GF Kali… no clue. Hope she’s okay.
Ex-wife: she has private FB, but I run into her family members occasionally, and they all seem to know what’s going on in my life, so I’m guessing she’s been following me on FB. They do tell me about her, of course, so I know that she’s got a daughter, the baby’s dad is in jail, she’s gotten more heavily involved in witchcraft… and judging by the number of bill collectors who call me looking for her, she’s been scamming/ripping off a number of car dealers and rent-to-own places.
Oh, sure, I’ve done Internet searches on a few of them out of curiosity and boredom. One surprise was the only woman who ever broke my heart. I was sure by this time that she’d live in a trailer park with nine kids and an abusive husband. Surprisingly, she has a Master’s in Library Science and seems to be a pillar of her small community in Oklahoma. Good for her.
I had a college sweetheart call me out of the blue twenty years after our break up, just to let me know that she just got divorced because her husband “wouldn’t let me grow as a person.” God, that phone call brought to mind all the reasons I broke up with her in the first place. Surprisingly again, she remembered our relationship as some sort of perfect romance, not the roller coaster it was.
ETA: When I was doing my ninth step in AA about 20 years ago (“Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others”), my sponsor insisted that I NOT contact my previous girlfriend. He said, “One of the best amends you can make to some people is to leave them alone.” He was a wise man.
I have two exes. One I haven’t seen, spoken to, heard from or heard about in about 17 years and I’m perfectly happy with it.
The other (broke up 14 years ago) I’ve seen in person once, emailed a couple times and we’re Facebook friends. We never talk on there but I see his newsfeed. I’m glad to know how he is, he was a raging alcoholic when we were together and has since stopped drinking and finished college.
I’m friends with both of my ex-boyfriends. One often reminds me why he annoyed me, although that’s more of personality conflict than him being a bad person. The other is engaged and we don’t hang out as often as we should (our ‘have enough energy to deal with people’ times don’t seem to correspond often).
This is (one of) the reason(s) why I’m not on Facebook. I don’t want my exes to know about me, and/or vice versa.
I’m not THAT old, but I’m old enough to remember dating before email, cel phones, texting, Googlestalking and Facebook. Breaking up with someone back then was so much easier. It hurt for a while, but you moved on, and at most you had a box of photos and letters to remind you of better times. The occasional conversation with a shared friend or acquaintance would get you up to speed, and that would be it.
Now? I can be in touch with any of my exes, and they me, at any moment. I can see how they’re doing, they can see how I’m doing, they can see who we’re dating. If we didn’t like each other, we can hate and resent from a distance; if we still miss each other, we can distract each other from the lives and loves we should be having now.
I hate that connectivity. It makes it so much more difficult to move on and heal.
Oh well. 21st century, progress, Brave New World, etc.
The ex I only know through common friends went through a phase where he would contact me and tell me how I was not getting over the break up and was always getting in his life (I guess because I kept the mutual friends?), and how I was envious of his life including his love life. After I replied “Eh, I have a “won’t ask about you” policy”, he dropped that. Turns out, he was also going with that spiel on and on to our mutual friends, who also replied “Really, she doesn’t ask about you.” OK, so they told me that (without me asking about him first), just a “Oh, and this happened…” thing.
Then, later on, he contacted me again, all pouty because this time, finally, he realizes I do not care to know about him, don’t ask about him, etc. He then complains to me why I don’t want to be friends or even ask about him. Later on, common friends mention that he indeed goes pouty and does not like it that I keep touch with the mutual friends and don’t ask about his whereabouts.
Only ex I have contact with is my first husband and that’s only since our daughter found me. The others, I couldn’t care less about. Well there’s one, but that was back when I was eighteen and I just think about him now and then. I haven’t really LOOKED for him.
Have not seen my ex-wife’s face since the court date after I had her removed from the house with the Order For Protection 9 years ago this month. Once in a great while my path takes me through her neighborhood and, as she lives on a main drag, I have cause to drive past her house. I can tell by the decorations in the window and the fact that the yard projects I was in the middle of NINE FUCKING YEARS AGO haven’t moved a single inch, that she still lives there.
She doesn’t appear to have a Facebook page. I checked like a year ago when I was looking up a number of old friends and acquaintences. I went to the Ren Fest last year for the first time since our divorce and was very happy not to run into her there. I’m quite certain that the first time we meet, there will be high drama on her end.
Yeah. She has pretty severe manic episodes, and (after one suicide attempt that actually caused pretty severe personality changes after she came out of her coma), even more problems with impulsive behavior than she had had before. What seems like stalkerish actions to everyone else is “A REALLY GREAT IDEA!!!” for her. When she showed up at my job (midnight or so), she had friends in tow and she wanted me to clock out and go play “capture the flag” with them at a local park. Midnight. The driving-by-my-apartment thing was after she’d work herself into a frenzy and had convinced herself that something bad had happened to me. I just felt bad for her, and stopped the friendship (then) because I couldn’t bear to see her falling apart.
She was doing a bit better when we restarted the friendship–meds seemed to be helping her now–but she lately has begun calling herself a Cassandra, predicting a breakdown of social order, and she’s offered to be my “knight in shining armor” and save me when society collapses any day now. I’m somewhat thankful that all of this has remained in the realm of texting/messaging. Not sure what I’ll do if she shows up at my job again, this time in survival gear.
I’ve had some friends politiely wonder about my stance, question its maturity, etc. I told them I’ve always been mature when confronted with the accidental meeting at a party, or even the late-night “been thinking of you” phone call. It’s the constant contact thing in the electronic age that I don’t have the emotional patience for. I don’t want to be in contact with the bad girlfriends (they were bad, after all), and I don’t enjoy being in contact with the good ones, either (I’m a sap who easily misses the ones that got away-- “Oh, so you and your husband got to visit Florence like we always dreamt we would? Glad I know that!”).
Very, very rarely. About 5 years after my first real relationship ended, I looked up that ex to see if he had graduated med school (we broke up because he started med school). I found out he ended up dropping that track and went for a PhD, instead. Higher education made him borderline asexual due to time/energy constraints, and I couldn’t handle it. Maybe he’s married now, but I doubt it… too Type-A.
But normally, not at all. I prefer to go no-contact immediately, then I set to work forgetting them/erasing them from my life. It works. I mean, I remember their names and stuff, but I’m not compelled to check up on them. The person they are now isn’t the same person I dated. Although as the internet gets better at finding people, maybe I’ll get nostalgic someday and start doing this.
Of my 4 serious exes I’m in touch with 2, very cordially. In fact, I’m seeing my ex-wife this weekend. The other is my college girlfriend; we found each other on Facebook a few years ago and I spent a day with her on my last trip to New York.
The other 2 have been impossible to find. One of them may well be online, but I can’t read Japanese, so I have to settle for fond memories of our year abroad (we were both exchange students in France). I’m the one who ended things, so she might not be too happy to hear from me anyway.
The other may be right here in Seattle, for all I know. After she went into an IT-related field she got really good at covering her online tracks. Knowing her, she’s hiding from someone. I hope it isn’t me, but if it is, at least she’s safe.
I’m Facebook friends with two ex-boyfriends: one I dated briefly but intensely for a few months in '98 (and was out of touch with until a year or so ago, when I discovered his profile via a mutual FB friend), and the other I dated for 2.5 years and lived with from '08-'09. The breakup wasn’t bad enough to justify un-friending each other. We never see each other in real life anymore, but every now and then one will comment on the other’s status – usually having to do with our respective dogs (we were living together when I adopted mine).
A few years ago I was briefly FB friends with another ex – my very first boyfriend, from college – but he unfriended me after a few messages. Things seemed to be cool with us; I wonder if maybe his wife put the kibosh on our re-connection.
I don’t have many other ex-bfs, but there is one who I’d love to connect with on FB (or otherwise catch up with): we dated for a few months in '05 and broke up because he had serious co-dependency issues with his ex-wife, but he was a good guy and I wish we’d stayed in touch. Unfortunately he has a very common name, so he’s impossible to find via searching (and I no longer remember his email address). Ah, well.
I don’t look up anyone on purpose, no. But the way the social web works these days, every once in a while on FB or LinkedIn I’ll see one of them in the “People You May Know” block on the page. Kinda creepy how it does that. It’s not really a welcome reminder of their existence, but oh well.
My first ‘real’ BF I’d be interested in hearing about, though not really getting back in touch with. He was going through some gender identity issues when we were dating and I always wondered how that ultimately turned out. Mostly because when I asked him if he’d thought about transitioning, he said “No, it would be too complicated to explain to my family,” which struck me as a not-ultimately-sustainable reason. I hope that whatever he did or didn’t do about it, he did it for himself and not anyone else.
In the distant past I made a couple attempts, separated by a few years, to look him up and find out, but he was nowhere to be found.
My ex-wife actually introduced me to this board, but she became less interested in it as I got more into the Dope. She was not posting here at all by the time we split up. I have no idea whether she’s had occasion to visit or spy or whatnot since then. She’s been blocked on my Facebook account since before I moved out of the house. I keep in fairly regular contact with her brother (but not the other siblings), and we have a couple of remaining mutual friends. I have never once in the three years since we’ve split asked anyone how or what she’s doing, so I really have no idea. I don’t know whether anyone has kept her up-to-date on what I’m doing, but I’m not sure why she’d care. I used to be really bothered by the idea of her knowing about my life in any way, but I don’t consider it to be a huge deal at this point.
We haven’t seen each other in person in just over two years, and haven’t had any communication at all in well over a year. The closest we’ve come since then is a funeral for a family member of hers that I expected her to be at, but either she looks dramatically different enough that I didn’t recognize her, or she didn’t show.
My two previous exes before my marriage were people I stayed friends with for several years. One has disappeared, and I’ve never found her or found out what happened to her. The other died at a very young age from cancer.
High school boyfriends - no. The only one of them I’d be interested in keeping tabs on killed himself about ten years ago. Another one sent me a friends request on FB last year, but under a made up pretentious name, so once I realised it was him and he was clearly even more immature than ever, so I declined.
University boyfriends - no. Bizarrely enough OKCupid recommended them both as potential matches to me recently, but we’re not on talking terms on RL or IRL and I’m not that interested in what they’re up to. We’re mainly not talking because they are friends with, and took the side of:
Former husband - no. I’ve blocked him on FB and although he has a blog, I genuinely don’t read it. And when people do read it and tell me what he’s up to, that gives me material for at least a week’s worth of nightmares about being back with him, so I’d really rather they didn’t please.
Other long term ex - alright, guilty, I follow him on twitter, but he only posts really dull stuff about Ubuntu so it hardly counts
I know my former husband is being informed somewhow, his brother emailed me this week referring to me “not being well”, so presumably someone told them that I’d been in hospital.
I’m happy now, which I wasn’t when I was with my ex, but I suspect it doesn’t look good that I’m still an unemployed single mother crashing at my sister’s house.
cough I mean, a full time stay at home mother, who’s close to her family and does charity and voluntary work in her local community (and oh yeah, has a new partner too)
I became sort of online only friends with my ex. He wanted to meet in person but I had no interest in it whatsoever (plus, I knew it would make my SO uncomfortable, and the ex wasn’t worth that). Anyway I let him see my LJ, which isn’t terribly private, just full of day-to-day natterings, and a few other things.
Gradually it became obvious he was stalking me. I don’t know if he wanted to get together, or, more likely, see if I was available for a quick fling, but either way, it really made me uncomfortable.
So I cut off contact. I have no real interest to see what he’s doing. I know he’s married and has kids. I don’t care about the minutiae of anyone’s life but my own.
I just felt bad for her, and stopped the friendship (then) because I couldn’t bear to see her falling apart.
