This article was originally published on July 26, at 11:20 a.m.

We were never Facebook official. As far as breakups on social media go, I realize I had it pretty easy. The only visual record of our November-to-April romance online is a picture of us at a wedding that his friend posted, which is still visible on my profile until enough new photos push it out of sight. I’m a romantic, but I’m also a cynic, so I didn’t post my pictures of us together for this very reason. There are no statuses to change, no albums to take down or make private, no custody battle over an Instagram-famous puggle.

But there was the issue of following one another.

When we called things off over two months ago, our once-intimate relationship became an ongoing back-and-forth of Likes on Facebook and Instagram, a series of clicks that assumed, in my mind, the emotional gravitas of a Dostoyevsky novel. We’ve exchanged only a handful of text messages since breaking up and have met just once face to face. Our primary mode of communication has been expressing silent, “thumbs-up” approval as we watch each other move on.

After our relationship became purely digital, my phone constantly threatened to send my stomach into my shoes with a flick of my thumb. He doesn’t use Snapchat or Twitter, so those are my safe spaces. We already matched on Tinder, so hopefully I’m in the clear there, too. But his sporadic approach to Facebook and Instagram made them minefields of the worst order. Just when I’d been lulled into a trance, scrolling mindlessly past what a high school frenemy ate for lunch in Tulum — boom. There he’d be, smiling up at me, with people from his life whom I’d met and loved, themselves now among my Facebook friends with whom I feel a genuine if tenuous connection.

I almost always clicked Like, to make a show of being cooler about our split than I really was, and because it was, in some way, a true expression of how I felt — I still liked him, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

Then, of course, there were my posts: photos in my tux from the wedding where he’d have been my plus-one, from the beach where I’d invited him to be a guest in my summer share, from the Florence + the Machine concert that we had tickets to see together. These are just the kind of moments I usually share online, but now, I found myself posting them with defiance echoing through my head — take that. Look at how great my life is; I’m not sad at all. I think I was trying to convince myself as much as him or anyone else.