Dear Ex: This Is Why I Blocked You After Our Breakup

Social media means breakups aren’t as cut and dry as they used to be. There’s always a chance that a picture of him with his new girlfriend will pop up on your Instagram feed, one of your mutual friends will tag him in a Facebook status, or he’ll think it’s okay to fave your tweet about the horror movie you just saw. Luckily, the option to block and forget is always there, which is exactly what I decided to do with one ex in particular. If he wanted to know why I blocked him after our breakup, here’s what I’d say. (Thankfully, he’ll never be able to ask.)

1. You wouldn’t leave me alone. Even after it was over, you were still liking my pictures, trying to talk to me over Facebook messenger, and tagging me in random posts. Even when I asked you to stop and to leave me alone, you wouldn’t, so what other choice did I have? If you would have respected my wishes to have some time to myself away from you to process my feelings, it wouldn’t have had to come to this.
2. I didn’t want to see your face. Everyone who has ever been through a breakup knows the temptation to scroll through an ex’s pictures one night after a couple of glasses of wine is very real. I might have thought I wanted to keep that option open at first, but it got to a point where I just wanted to forget what you looked like altogether. I blocked you after our breakup so I could get your face out of my head.
3. I didn’t want to know if you were dating. The hardest part of breaking up is seeing your ex with someone new. If it was too soon, I’d wonder if you ever loved me. I’d obsess over whether she was prettier than me, if she was smarter than me, and it would snowball from there. Blocking you helped me avoid that. It’s not that I didn’t ever expect you to move on to someone new, I just didn’t want it shoved in my face.
4. I didn’t want you to know if I was dating. As much as I disliked you by the end of our relationship, I still didn’t want to hurt you. I also didn’t want to leave the door open for you to possibly find and harass the new guy I was seeing. Given your previous behavior, I wouldn’t put it past you. I wanted the freedom to move on with someone new without being under your watchful eye. It’s better this way for both of us.
5. The temptation to check up on you was too strong. Sometimes I still think about you and want to know how you’re doing, but since I have no intention of unblocking you, your life now remains a mystery, just like it should. I don’t want to stay stuck in the past — I’d rather look forward to my future. It’s too easy to stalk people on social media these days, so the only way I could avoid this is if I blocked you after our breakup.
6. It was easier to get over you. This seems obvious, but there are still plenty of people who don’t take this simple step after a breakup. I didn’t want to wallow in our failed relationship for longer than necessary, so I needed to be free from the possibility that you would message me wanting to “talk.” I wasn’t strong enough in the beginning to say no to you, so I had to eliminate your presence in my life completely.
7. You told me I’d have to. I remember you telling me once that if we ever broke up, I’d have to block your number because you’d never be able to keep your distance. Looking back, that’s a giant red flag. But I took your advice and not only blocked you on all social media but blocked your phone number too. Thanks for the tip. Here’s one for you: maybe learn not to override women’s boundaries and instead learn to respect their wishes.
8. It’s what you deserved. After how you treated me, there was no way I was leaving an opening for you to sneak back into my life. I didn’t want you knowing anything about me anymore. I wasn’t okay with you being able to stalk my social media feeds without my knowledge, so blocking you was the only way to go.
9. I didn’t trust myself. Breaking up with you might have been the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean it was easy. There were times that I wanted to send you a message and talk to you all night like we used to. By blocking you, I put another step between myself and sending that incredibly ill-advised “what’s up?” text.
10. It was the first step in moving on with my life. When I blocked you, I was finally ready to accept that it was really over and there was no turning back. It was like I was telling myself I wasn’t waiting for us to reconcile anymore — I was finally ready to move on.

Why I should have blocked him after our breakup right away

Even if he had respected my personal space and we had the time and distance to work through our feelings about the relationship and its ending, I really should have blocked him sooner — here’s why.

1. He treated me like crap. This is probably the best, most important reason of all. My ex was basically the boyfriend from hell, so why should he even have a chance to communicate with me after we ended things? By not blocking him right away, I was leaving the lines of communication open for him to come back around and talk all his BS.
2. He didn’t deserve a chance to manipulate me. Because my ex warned me all along that if we ever ended things, he’d basically haunt me like a ghost forevermore, I should have taken that as a direct threat and blocked him anywhere and everywhere I could. Because I didn’t, he then had a chance to manipulate me, to try and spin things in completely ridiculous ways to try and convince me to get back together with him. The sad thing is, I almost fell for it.
3. The temptation to get back together was overwhelming. Even though I know he treated me badly and I hated him for it, I also found myself tempted to give him another chance on a few different occasions. It’s not like I believed anything would be different, but I was lonely and he was talking a big game about how we belonged together, blah blah blah. I nearly listened to him, and that wouldn’t have been possible had I blocked my ex right after the breakup.
4. There’s no other way to move on. Some people like to fool themselves into believing that they can stay in contact with their exes and even be “friends” right after a breakup but that’s ridiculous. Those people either end up in an on again, off again relationship or miserable because they know they can’t be with their ex so they’re stuck in some kind of weird limbo. If I’d have blocked my ex as soon as we ended our relationship, I could have started my healing process way sooner. At least I know better next time.