You don’t message them. You’d never message them. That would be pathetic.
You just look.
Once a week, maybe. Sometimes once a day. You know their handle by heart. You know which of their friends still posts them. You know they went to a wedding in October and that the person standing next to them in the third photo is new. You’ve zoomed in. You’ve checked whether it was a tag or an upload. You’ve done the math on the timeline.
Nobody knows you do this. It costs nothing, harms no one, takes ninety seconds. And yet you close the app feeling like you’ve eaten something rotten.
Why do we watch the people we’ve supposedly released?
Freud drew a line between mourning and melancholia. Mourning is grief that moves. You lose something, you suffer, and slowly the energy you invested in that person returns to you, available for other things. Melancholia is grief that stalls. The loss isn’t accepted, it’s absorbed. The lost person sets up residence inside you and you keep feeding them.
Checking is feeding. Every glance is a small deposit of attention into a relationship that officially closed. You aren’t grieving the person. You’re maintaining them. You’ve built a private museum with one exhibit and you visit regularly to make sure the lights are still on.
Here’s the strange part: the watching feels like distance. You tell yourself it’s harmless precisely because there’s no contact. But surveillance is the opposite of distance. It’s intimacy without consent. You know what they had for dinner. They don’t know you exist anymore. That asymmetry isn’t detachment. It’s a one-way mirror, and you’re the one standing behind it.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about the panopticon, a prison designed so guards could see every prisoner without the prisoners knowing when they were being watched. Foucault’s point was about power: the watcher holds it, the watched are shaped by it. But look at your situation and the power runs backwards. You’re the guard, and you’re the one who can’t leave the tower. The prisoner walked out years ago. You’re still doing shifts.
That’s what surveillance of an ex really is. Not power over them. Power over the story.
Because a breakup isn’t just the loss of a person. It’s the loss of a narrative you were the co-author of. As long as you’re watching, the story hasn’t ended. There’s still a next chapter, and you’re still reading it. The new partner, the new city, the haircut, the job: these are plot developments. You’re following along. You haven’t put the book down.
Kierkegaard distinguished between recollection and repetition. Recollection looks backward, trying to relive what was. Repetition looks forward, willing to receive what is again, differently. He thought most people were stuck in recollection, loving what they’d lost more than what was in front of them, because the lost thing is safe. It can’t disappoint you anymore. It’s finished, and finished things are perfect.
Except an ex you’re watching isn’t finished. That’s the trap. They keep updating. So you get the worst of both: the frozen ideal of recollection and the live anxiety of a story that’s still moving without you.
Ask yourself what you’re actually looking for when you open their profile. Be honest.
Sometimes it’s evidence that they’re worse off. That the breakup cost them something. That without you, they’ve become less. This is understandable and ugly, and pretending it isn’t there doesn’t make it go away.
Sometimes it’s evidence that they’re fine. Which sounds generous until you notice how it lands: if they’re fine, the relationship meant nothing, and if it meant nothing, what were those years? Their happiness becomes an insult to your grief.
Sometimes it’s just the ache of proximity. You want to be near them and this is the only door left open.
None of these is a good reason. All of them are human. But notice that every one of them requires the other person to stay in a role they didn’t audition for. They’re not your ex anymore, not really. They’re a character you check in on. You’ve turned a person into content.
The Buddhist tradition would call this attachment, and it would be right, but the word has become so soft it barely lands. Try this instead: you’re clinging to something that is actively leaving. The harder you grip, the more it pulls. Every glance confirms they’re gone, and the confirmation hurts, so you glance again to see if it’s changed, and it hasn’t, and so on. The checking doesn’t ease the loss. It rehearses it.
There’s a psychological finding called the Zeigarnik effect: we remember unfinished tasks far better than finished ones. Open loops nag at us. A relationship that ended badly, or ambiguously, or without the conversation you wanted, is the ultimate open loop. And surveillance feels like a way of working on it. You’re gathering data. You’re staying informed. Surely at some point the information will add up to closure.
It won’t. Closure is not something you find in their feed. It’s something you decide. It’s the moment you accept that the story ended at the last page you were actually part of, and everything after that isn’t your chapter to read.
So what do you do?
You could block them. People resist this because it feels dramatic, like admitting you can’t be trusted. But you can’t be trusted. That’s the point. Mourning needs the door shut. You don’t leave the fridge open and ask yourself to be strong about it.
You could name what you’re doing. Not “just checking.” Watching. Monitoring. Keeping tabs. The vocabulary of surveillance, applied honestly, is hard to sustain. Most people can’t keep doing something once they’ve called it what it is.
You could ask what part of you would be unemployed if you stopped. Some part of you has been holding this job for a long time. What would it do with the free hours? What would it have to feel?
That last question is the real one. The checking isn’t the problem. It’s the anesthetic. Underneath it is a grief you haven’t let move, and the reason you haven’t let it move is that moving grief hurts more than stalled grief, at least at first.
But stalled grief costs you something every single week. It costs you ninety seconds and a rotten feeling and one more day in the tower.
Let them go. Not for their sake. They don’t know you’re there.
For yours.