“Lose my number” used to be a thing. Now it’s more like: lose my number, unfriend me, stop following me on Instagram and Twitter, remove me from Snapchat, delete my email address. Basically, you just need to light your phone on fire and throw it into a pit of no return.

When you end a relationship, it is harder now than ever to allow yourself to truly disconnect. It does not matter if it was a year long pursuit, or perhaps just someone that you had met a few times. The fact that you’re involuntarily keeping them in your life can be the hardest thing to come to terms with, even if you are done with them.

At the very least, you can find out where they work, what their email addresses is, and the city they live in, in a matter of seconds. You can even just message someone on Facebook or Twitter, or really any social media site that has the power to communicate with another human being. The ease of communication is beyond accessible and convenient in our society, but is it too much so? The ability to “creep” and be “creeped on” is easier now more than ever.

This kind of thing is the worst when a relationship with someone ends. But it also sucks at times when you least expect it. Oh, how it burns for someone to brag about how much they are enjoying their life without you. But that kind of thing is easy to get over.

Time typically lets those burns heal, but it is the worst when you are finally over someone and BOOP – your ex-boyfriend casually likes your Instagram picture. Like, no – why? Stop it. Why are you inserting yourself into my life?

I wish I could say that I have had experience with this in only an isolated situation, but it has occurred multiple times in my history of dating. The relationship ended, the texts stopped coming, or it just plain ol’ didn’t work out after a few dates. They are gone, and that’s cool! Live life and move on, but then out of the blue you get a “like”, a friend request ( yes – after you had deleted them a few months before), a message, a tweet, a damn carrier pigeon. Regardless of their random choice to contact you, you just can’t help but want to scream, “What do you want from me?”

And yes, you can unfollow someone, block them, remove them, but how far do you have to go to remove someone from your life, someone who you don’t hate? How much effort is even worth putting into removing someone from your life, when we live in a world where they could honestly get a hold of you at any given moment in time if they really wanted to?

There comes a point where you don’t necessarily want to remove someone from your social media friend lists because that can be petty. It is so petty to remove someone if things didn’t work out with them. Sure it sucks that that one guy you dated for a while ghosted you, or your ex-boyfriend gets a new girlfriend and reminds everyone on Facebook about it every five seconds, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you hate them enough to cut complete ties from them. If you saw them in public, you’d nod hello. But by no means do you want to facilitate anything other than something cordial, so it sucks every time they pop into your newsfeed.

And even when you do delete them from all means of contact, there is nothing worse than the temptation to check in. To see what they are up to, how happy they are, and how you wish things would’ve have ended a little differently.

Sometimes you just want to forget that someone exists. Forget that they can contact you at any given moment. No one likes a surprise text or a message from an ex. It brings unnecessary drama into your life, but it is so. damn. easy. for someone to do this nowadays. It has me saying out loud “Why. Why. Why. Why. WHY are you contacting me? What good does this bring to you?”. It’s the subtlety that can be the worst of it. Nothing real – just a “like” here and there. Passive aggressive enough to annoy you, but not quite worth creating a fuss over.

I guess there is not much you can do about this unless you’re the kind of person who files restraining orders on everyone who you end a relationship with, but I am not that kind of person. And I doubt you are either. So I guess we will just have to get used to the fact that if we are on the internet in any capacity, that we are always available somehow, someway.