Breaking up is hard to do. From the tears and anger to the constant reminders of them in your life and the dividing up of shared stuff, I’m sure there are times you’ve wished you could just forget them altogether.
In today’s digital age, that is increasingly more difficult. Reminders of our exes don’t just mean walking past the coffee shop where you had your first date. Now, it’s as simple as logging onto Facebook. Photos, wall posts, and messages of your life together are all neatly packaged on the social media site, a daily reminder of your relationship and ex flooding your newsfeed and profile.
Have you ever wished you could just delete your ex from your mind completely?
The new mobile app, KillSwitch, might be able to help.
Released on Valentines Day (how fitting), the app, whose tagline is “Making breakups suck less,” makes it easy to eliminate your ex’s entire presence from your Facebook timeline.
The app searches your profile for content such as photos, videos, wall posts, and status updates linked or tagged to your ex’s specific Facebook ID. Once it identifies all the content, you have the option to delete it all or manually select certain interactions you want deleted. If you don’t want to delete your entire history with your ex on Facebook, you can choose to save photos, videos, or anything else in a secret KillSwitch folder that lives on your Facebook account for easy access whenever you want, invisible to others.
Helpful tip: You have to still be friends with your ex on Facebook to use the app, so don’t make any rash decisions in the heat of the moment after your breakup.
KillSwitch begs the question: Can we ever really invest in a new relationship while evidence of our past ones remain etched into the peripheries of our digital lives?
KillSwitch’s site says it aims to be social media’s answer to helping people move on post-breakup. Their website says:
“Relationships ending and moving on is an essential, healthy part of life. And while social media intends to reflect many aspects of the human experience, it doesn’t yet easily reflect the key element- the end of relationships. With KillSwitch, we’re trying to fill that gap, bridge online with offline. To help people move on in their digital lives as much as they want and need to in their personal lives.”
This app reminded me of the technology used in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, albeit on a much lesser level. In the film, Jim Carrey’s character uses a technology that literally erases his memories of Kate Winslet’s character from his mind after a messy breakup. Through reliving his memories with her during the erasure, he realizes that even though it hurts, holding on to the memories of her are still important.
Do we really want to erase everything about our ex? Sure, breakups are hard. The inevitability of love is that hurts. But just because we delete a few pictures and wall posts from our ex, does that make the sting of a break up hurt any less?
Not every memory is going to be good and love is not always perfect. It is messy and complicated, but isn’t it better to have those memories and to have loved than to have never loved at all? It might sound cheesy, but technology is already streamlining so much of our lives. I’m a big proponent of new technology and the innovative ways in which it can assist us, but I can’t help but wonder if using it to erase our memories is going a little far.
Memories and experiences make us who we are, and by deleting them, even just their digital imprint, aren’t we erasing a part of ourselves?
