Mediate Michigan

When my ex-wife and I got married, Facebook was just being born. Sure, we had email and AOL Instant Messenger and faxing. But ‘social networking’ hadn’t yet hit critical mass in the form of Zuckerberg’s fantastic connection machine.

By the time my ex and I filed for divorce, however, Facebook was so ingrained in our lives, it was actually on the table during mediation.

“I think we need to unfriend each other,” my soon-to-be ex wife said across the big conference room table.

We hadn’t even begun discussing splitting up the furniture or the house or the dogs.

All of a sudden, my divorce was Real. And perhaps there is no better symbol of the finality of a divorce than how it’s borne out online. After several years of learning how to communicate with each other (and thousands of dollars in therapist’s fees), we were now deciding not to communicate via the world’s easiest way to stay connected.

Which is to say, for all the remarkable bringing together that social networking affords us–for all the warm fuzzy long lost high school classmates and unknown cousins and dictatorships brought down–there’s another side to the phenomenon.

It makes it really hard to let go of someone.

via Adam Paul: Til Death Do Us Unfriend.