'Kissy pictures – gushing posts – sappy statuses. We’ve all been there… digitally marking our relationship territory. But what happens if you break up? Where does the love go? More importantly what do you do with all those painful reminders of your now defunct relationship, etched into your digital life?'
That is the million-dollar question, posed by KillSwitch, the app that promises to clean that ex out of your hair, and off your Facebook wall.
Stalking your ex on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat/Vine/Whatsapp is just a rite of passage these days, isn’t it? Along with changing your profile picture eight times in the first 24 hours after you break up and compiling the perfect fuck-you soundtrack on Spotify, you follow your ex's every move, because that’s just what we do – right?
Never mind the fact that we could be causing ourselves INTENSE PSYCHOLGOCIAL DAMAGE (according to a 2012 study), when it comes to social media and stalking, we just can’t help ourselves.
This is what a selection of new (and not so new) apps are relying on, anyway. KillSwitch, which launched last year on Valentine’s Day, removes pictures, videos, wall posts and status updates you’re tagged in with your ex, and even contains a ‘severity slide’ so you can decide how permanent you want the whitewash to be.
Then there’s Eternal Sunshine, which, like Kill Switch promises to delete that ex from your Facebook life, without alerting them. If you like your technology-based heartbreak solutions to be more Orwellian, Ex-Lover Blocker (a Brazillian app created in 2012) alerts your friends if you try and call your ex, and publically shames you on Facebook if you go ahead and call them anyway. Admitedly it does this in Portugese, which somewhat softens the blow.
But what does the rise of these anti-stalking apps say about us? Isn’t it obvious that obsessing over someone who broke our heart, or even bruised it slightly, is a bad thing? Why do we need to be told to stop beating ourselves over the head with it?
It might sound a bit harsh (sorrynotsorry), but have we become so immersed in social media that we’re incapable of stopping ourselves from indulging in clearly damaging behavior online that’s going to have a negative affect on our real, actual, offline lives? You wouldn’t go and stand outside your ex’s place of work every night just to get a glimpse of him, would you (well you might, but you probably need to read a whole different article in that case)? So why would you spend countless evenings gazing, wide-eyed, at a bunch of the back of his head on Facebook? And more importantly, do we need an app to make us stop?
Maybe it's time we step away from our laptops, switch off our mobiles, and start getting over our exes the old-fashioned way.
Follow Rebecca on Twitter @Rebecca_hol
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.