mute him on instagram
don't participate in the self flagellation of checking on your ex
Three years ago, my ex broke up with me for the second time. The moment he left my flat, I deleted our conversation on imessage, hid all of our photos from my camera roll, and removed him from my social media. By the time he got home, there were no traces of him in my life, online and off.
When we broke up the first time 6 months prior, it was right before I was leaving for a three week trip home that we both knew was I was going to find difficult.
“I know we’re going no contact but can you text me when you get back so I know you’re okay?” he had said.
I thought it was sweet that he cared but it meant that the first three weeks of the breakup, the ones where you’re supposed to process and accept the end of your relationship, I spent them counting down the days until I could text him again.
We played a game of hide and seek on social media, not following each other but watching each other’s stories (which was hard for me because I have a following so I can’t scroll through thousands of people on my story views which means I got a guy friend to post a story of me so I could repost it. Guy friend later told me my ex had indeed watched his story. Pathetic)
When I got back to London, I texted him and lo and behold we got talking, he apologised about things, and I took him back.
In those three weeks, I had considered the possibility of getting back together, but I knew he had so much growing to do that realistically, we should not get back together for at least 6 months.
Yet, we got talking so soon that a little over a month after the initial breakup, we were in a relationship again.
Things didn’t work out (shocker!) so when we broke up the second time, I swore off all contact for real this time. Removed, deleted, goodbye.
To this day, I have not looked up his Instagram.
I am god’s strongest soldier.
I think most people don’t want to mute or unfollow someone they feel some type of way about (an ex or not) because it feels “mean”. And I think we generally need to be more selfish with what we consume. If an influencer is making you feel worse about yourself, unfollow them. If seeing an ex is reminding you of all of the ways you were mistreated, remove them. Even worse, if they are subtly notifying you of their existence but isn’t doing anything, just keeping themselves in your periphery, it’s stunting your growth much more than you realise. Every time you’re involuntarily reminded of their existence, it feels like someone’s tapping you on the shoulder and you’re forced to turn and face them for a minute, losing track of where you were going. The time it takes for you to recalibrate yourself on your path is longer than you think.
With exes especially, feelings of vindication come into play. You want to know if they’ve moved on, if they’re dating someone, who they’re with, what they’re doing. If they lied, if they were right, if they were wrong.
It may seem innocent but your desire to collect more information to confirm your biases about them (“I knew he’d end up dating that girl he told me not to worry about!!”) is an act of self flagellation - you confirm whatever suspicion about them and after feeling smug for a minute, you leave feeling worse about the situation and more importantly, yourself.
Maybe my ex ended up dating the girl he told me not to worry about, maybe he didn’t. I’ll never know. What’s important is my desire to move on and to not feel anything towards the situation more than I already did was bigger than my desire to be right about said girl.
So if you break up with someone, remove them. If that feels like too much, mute them. And muster up all of your courage to not look them up in moments of weakened self restraint paired with penance under a veil of curiosity. Go read a book instead, cook a nice meal. There are so many wonderful things that you can do than chase any feeling from someone whose reminder will hurt you. Replace the “I just want to know” with “I just want peace”.
Luckily, my ex and I had met on Hinge so I was never going to see him again. We didn’t have any friends in common and our worlds were mostly apart (he, a musician, me, a designer). But if you’re in a situation where you’re in the same friendship group, then you have even more reason to mute. You’ll get regular reminders of their existence in your social life, why add social media to the list of moments you’re reminded of the pain?
The sooner you do this, the sooner you’ll move on, process what happened and in most cases, realise you don’t want that person in your life anyway.
And you’ll never make the mistake of getting back with someone who isn’t good for you.
Even better, if after all of this time and space away from them, you still think they’re the one for you, then that in itself says a lot. But it won’t if you get to that conclusion after constantly looking to see if they posted a new story or worst, if they’ve seen yours.
If you liked this piece, I think you’ll love this one!
I enjoyed writing this and I was scared of posting it.
If you read this far, thank you, it means a lot 💌
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