Do You Haunt Your Ex Friends?

You follow their feeds, you Like their posts—but you haven’t talked to them in years. Why do we haunt the people from our past?

- Caitlin Dewey

Let me reassure you that I am not an Internet stalker. But I will never resist the slightly shameful urge to pore over my ex-best friend’s Instagram pictures.

Everyone has a friend or an ex like this, right? Research into social networks has shown that people now maintain old connections they would have forgotten in the past. A 2012 study found that 57 percent of couples stay Facebook friends after a breakup, and many continue to interact on FB even when they don’t IRL. Unless you’re a compulsive pruner of contacts, you carry a hive of exes and ex-friends around with you. Some call the trend ‘haunting’: a relationship that ends IRL but lives on in comments and Likes.

V* and I are a textbook example. We maintained a Thelma-and-Louise-level BFF-ship from age 12 to the third year of college. As people are known to do, we both changed a lot in school: V, in particular, fell in with a new group of liquid-eyelinered art school girls. We talked less each year, transferring our confidences to newer friends. The last time I saw her, during an ill-fated long-weekend trip in 2010, we could barely sustain a conversation.

But I still cared about her life as only a secret sharing, hairbrush-singing best friend could. And so I checked in on her Facebook every once in a while and made a compulsion of Liking all her Instagram photos. From a distance, I watched V go to grad school, move to New York, breakup with her boyfriend, and score a job at an art gallery. She Liked most of my photos too: of my boyfriend, whom she’d never met, and my new apartment, which she’d never seen.