Breaking up in the New Millennium

Relationships have been given a new dimension by the electronic age. When I was in high school, text messaging and cellphones were non-existent. Therefore, when a boy liked a girl, he had to gather enough guts to ask for a girl's home phone number; and harder still, muster enough courage to actually call her and risk having her parents answer the phone. Girls, of course, would never think of asking for a guy's number.

Then came text messaging. It became easier to get a girl's, or a guy's cell number. A casual "I'll text you about our class meeting", or some such lame excuse would naturally result in an exchange of numbers. Of course, email has also been around for awhile. Now there's Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites where you can just message each other and establish relationships of some sort. Technology simply made starting relationships much easier, and changed the face of the wooing process.

But what do all these developments mean though when you're having a breakup? Well, you realize that you have quite a long electronic trail to erase to be able to vent your anger and ease your pain. Whereas before, a simple gathering of love letters and pictures and putting them in a shoebox would suffice, now, you have to attend to several things to erase him from your memory (in your hard drive or your brain). Since this is the first breakup I've had in the uber-Internet age, these are the things that I realized I've had to do.

1. Remove him from my Yahoo! messenger contact list.
2. Remove his friends from my Yahoo! messenger contact list.
3. Remove him from my iChat contact list.
4. Erase the message history of all our chats from my Adium messenger (some dating back to 2005). Also, remove his name from Adium messenger contact list.
5. Change my status on Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook from "In a Relationship" to "Single".
6. Remove the offending parties from my Friendster list of friends. (People who knowingly cause you pain don't deserve to be called friends.)
7. Remove his contact information from my Palm Pilot.
8. Remove his special folder from my email inbox.
9. Delete all his emails.
10.Delete all his digital photos in emails, and in my iPhoto library.
11.Remove his number from my cellphone.
12.Remove links to blogs of offending parties from my blog.

I haven't even finished doing all the above, among other things I have to do to be able to shove the past eight and a half years into the annals of history. And I'm sure there are other things I might have forgotten that are still floating around on the World Wide Web.

On the plus side, I don't have to bother with shoeboxes or letter-burning anymore. Deleting someone from your life is now simply a wireless mouseclick away. If I can't have the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, I'll settle for the temporary solace of the Caye-free computer.