What happens when one become two?

I was on facebook yesterday and came across the profile of a friend of mine who got divorced.  She chose to excise every picture of her ex from her page.  I can’t blame her, but it made her page feel hollow. Whole sections of her life were just…. missing.  Their lives were intertwined, and could not be neatly separated without her losing a huge part of her own story.

I looked up the husbands page next. He had left in the pictures of them together (even from their wedding). It was a different approach, but just as painful to look through. It was a haunting of a life that once was, now gone.

While I care about these people, they are “facebook friends,” a category of people that means: I wish we were still friends, but we live in different places now and do not see each other any more. I don’t know what catalyzed the divorce, and I’m certainly not going to cast judgment or blame.  But I was sad as I looked at their pages.

Divorce takes two stories that have become one and tried to pull them apart, and it cannot be done, any more than you can remove any trace of your ex from your facebook page.