I don’t believe in resorting to wiping away my ex from my life, whether that is deleting him from my phone or removing him from Facebook. The truth is, he shared happy memories with me and unless I’ve decided that his entire presence as a human being is no longer worthy of living and breathing the same air as I am, deleting him won’t really do much.

What is portrayed on Facebook or any other social media site is just one side of his life, just like the pictures that I decide to post up on my page. I choose the best ones, the ones that don’t show my flaws and/or my crappy hair days. Ultimately, Facebook won’t wipe away his existence and everything associated with him away from my life; the world is a lot smaller than that. I have mutual friends with him, he’s met my family, and most importantly, he’s a part of the growth that I’ve gone through. In fact, if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t know as much as I do now about how to love and what kind of love I want.

I find that it’s becoming a common thing nowadays to read posts about turning off your phone or computer so that you can “experience what is happening around you, beyond the light-emitting screen.” Ironically, deleting my exes, my ex-best friends, or even my enemies will only come to show rather, how much I’ve let social media dictate my life. And as much as I hate to say it, it also comes to show how petty of a person I really can be.

So what if he’s untagged himself from all the photos you’ve taken with him? So what if he decides to post a photo of his current girlfriend up for the world to see? Do you honestly harbor so much negative feelings towards that person that you can’t even stand to look at his face, that you can’t even be happy for him? Will it satisfy you instead if you knew that he couldn’t live with himself after the breakup?

I think it’s an understatement to say that at some point, I forgot that I was once that girl standing next to him, indescribably content to be blinded by love, overjoyed to know that I was able to make it “Facebook official”. I praise my friends when they’ve found love and yet society tells me that I’m not allowed to praise my ex.

I think that the post-breakup curse that many of us share is the clinging onto the pain and the idea that if the person that has hurt you is no longer around you, that if you beat your ex in finding love before he does, that if you make him regret dumping you by getting a ‘banging body’, you will get better. Well, I’m not going to choose this route to get better. I will not delete him from my Facebook or my phone or my life.

He is a part of me, even if it’s in my past. I want to be able to accept that things didn’t work and then send him off with the best wishes of finding someone he can share the rest of his life with, someone more suitable than me. I want to be able to go on his Facebook page and smile sweetly at the person I once loved, forgiving him and myself for the way things ended, and thanking him for showing me what it was like to be young and naïve and blind.