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"  Back in the day, all you needed to do to rid all traces of your ex from your life was scratch his phone number out of your address book, toss out those old love letters, pull the ribbon out of the mix tape he made you, and turn those hard-copy pics of the two of you into fire kindling. Done and done. It&amp;#039;s a heck of lot easier to move on when there&amp;#039;s no more evidence of a past relationship (out of sight, out of mind, right?). But, thanks to modern tech, this is hella hard.  In fact, researchers at UC Santa Cruz have been looking into the effect digital possessions have when it comes to break-ups, examining how things like photos, texts, music, and video\u2014stored on our computers, phones, and Facebook\u2014can constantly remind us of our exes, sometimes when we least expect it. (Like, you put your iTunes on shuffle and all of a sudden the next song is that Death Cab jam that you and your ex listened to over and over again when you first started dating. And now you&amp;#039;re bawling at Starbucks. Awesome.)  The part of the findings I didn&amp;#039;t get was that half of the people who participated had kept pics of their ex on their FB pages, computers, and phone. (Are you kidding me with this? That&amp;#039;s just asking for it.) The process of getting rid of all of this stuff is super time consuming and can dredge up old memories, researchers say, but it&amp;#039;s well worth it. When my ex and I broke up, one of the first things I did was completely wipe him from my Facebook page. I deleted every damn photo of us that I&amp;#039;d posted and untagged myself from any pic other people posted of us. I blocked him. I blocked his family members. I defriended his fraternity brothers. Yeah, that&amp;#039;s right, boyz. I did it. Sound extreme? Maybe. But I know myself and, to really move on, I needed to completely cut off contact. I didn&amp;#039;t want to be temped to reminisce over old photos (I even took the files off my computer and put them on an external hard drive) and I didn&amp;#039;t want any surprising posts popping up in my news feed, like a photo of him and another chick. While I can still, to this day, recite his cell phone number (after all, I did call it multiple times a day for four years), getting over him was a whole lot easier without being able to Facebook-stalk him and his crew.  So, my stance is, while it might take a while and be kinda painful, doing a digital purge can swiftly get you on the path to post-breakup recovery. Just hit delete, already. Want more from Natasha? Follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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