Do we ever really break up? Do we ever really move on? These questions have crossed my mind multiple times over the past week. With social media, we are able to stay up to date with our ex’s life without even trying. Is it possible to completely move on from someone when you can’t seem to escape them? Personally, I don’t believe it’s possible. Social media has made it more difficult than ever to forget a past love -- maybe even impossible.

I cannot count how many times I’ve been updated on the lives of my friends’ exes. I get told to look at their Snapchat story, Instagram posts, and, most of all, screenshots of anything and everything that they can find. People are so quick to judge someone who feels the need to block an ex because they are “immature,” but I think the girls doing the blocking are the smart ones among us all. You cannot move on from someone if you see them everyday, whether it be in person or through cyberspace. Put the phone down; stop searching their name; delete old text messages; stop torturing yourself. You will never know what it’s like to be without someone until you are actually without them.

There’s a good side and a bad side to everything -- social media included. Social media makes it easy and convenient to stay in touch with everyone from family to friends to that one girl you know you went to school with but never spoke to, which is a great way to utilize social media, but it can also be an easy and convenient way to keep in touch with your ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, which is dangerous.

Before social media, people broke up and just never spoke again. You may look at that and think it to be sad but I think it sounds like a glorious way to break up. There are no constant reminders of your ex, you don’t see your ex, you can move on in peace without having to worry about judgment from your ex. You didn’t have the opportunity to search their name in Twitter and Instagram; your only option was to move on with grace and sanity.

Social media has made everything so complicated. Suddenly, people still feel entitled to know everything about their ex’s life when, in reality, their life no longer concerns you. You just believe that it does because you can still see them every day by typing their name in a search bar.

I always tell my friends that they should never search an ex’s name to cyber-stalk them because they will never ever move on that way. People are so attached to this idea of “closure” because no one ever seems to get this said “closure." Why? Because social media has made it too easy to believe that you are still apart of someone’s life when you may not even speak anymore. You can see tweets and wonder if they were written about you and you can see Instagram posts of your ex moving on and feel the crushing pain from the break up all over again.

So, back to my original point, do we ever really break up? Because I really don’t think we do anymore. We just search for a new distraction from the last distraction, a new person to cyber-stalk because we can never really get enough. Old loves can reconnect on so many different platforms that it’s almost impossible not to reconnect with someone. Blocking someone may be the only way to truly get over someone completely. It is not immature; it is not rude; it is necessary for your own sanity and health. Go out into the world and learn to live life without this person. Ignore the fact that you can see them just by a few movements of your thumbs. Embrace the breakup by never searching their name again.

You may always love and care for them and you may want to stay friends but you can’t right now. Nothing can change the past, so stop searching for it. Embrace a new beginning rather than trying to remember an ending.