Should you delete pictures of your ex when you break up?

A few years ago, the significant, long-term relationship I was in unexpectedly ended. When I started dating a few months later, a new suitor started following me on Instagram and he noticed something that seemingly irked him. He wanted to know why I still had pictures of my ex and our time together on my profile. He found it strange that I wouldn’t have culled the memories, thinking that perhaps it showed an inability on my part to move on with my life. (It’s worth noting that he was the sort of person who actually refused to have any digital record of his love life, on the basis that it might come back to haunt him one day.) The fact that I wasn’t going to delete the pictures wasn’t why things came to a halt, but I knew it bothered him the entire time.  

Since then, I’ve still not deleted pictures of my ex, either on my social media accounts or from my phone itself. Ours was an acrimonious split, and I think the fact that I had no desire to get back together with him was part of why I didn’t have the impetus to send everything to the trash can. I never spent time fondly looking through old pictures with rose-tinted glasses or tears in my eyes. I just got on with my life, accepting that the relationship had been good at the time, until it was not – and that it was now over. I don’t know whether or not he deleted images of us together – and perhaps the fact that he doesn’t use social media meant I didn’t feel that knee-jerk desire to show him how much I hated him by deleting all trace of him – something which I think is a major reason why a lot of people do it.

“For some people, deleting photographs can be an act of aggression,” agrees Dana Moinian, psychotherapist at The Soke. “‘I want to erase you; I want to prove you meant nothing.’ That isn’t closure – it’s still a form of relationship. But for others, deleting or archiving photographs is an act of care, which says, ‘This mattered and I need to protect myself from returning to it every day.’” For Dana, the important thing is to question the relationship you have with the images if you keep them – is it healthy or unhealthy? Is it helping you move on with your life or preventing you from doing so? “The real question is not whether you keep or delete the photos,” she says. “It’s whether they help you process the past or whether they keep you loyal to a life that’s no longer being lived.”

Of course, when it comes to social media, there’s also the option to simply archive an image, rather than deleting it forever. I can see how this is probably the right option for most people, to make them more palatable to future paramours and to prevent them from constantly rehashing the past. Social media is a public record of our lives and how we want people to see us, but what we have stored in our phone’s memory is another story altogether.

“When photos are constantly available (in the cloud, on social media, etc), the past can become present,” says Dana. “The relationship has ended but the nervous system keeps receiving invitations to re-enter it. Archive the photographs. Remove them from public display. Turn off the reminders that ambush you. Give your psyche fewer cues to reopen the wound. Later, when the emotional charge has softened, you can decide what deserves to remain as memory and what belongs to a chapter that has closed. The aim isn’t to pretend the relationship never happened – love that ends still forms us, but not everything that formed us needs to remain within reach.” 

Indeed, for many who do opt for a scorched earth policy, regrets come later on, particularly if they have done something rash in the moment that is unfixable. I often think about the fact that my grandmother threw away so many photos of my dad after my parents divorced, or cut him out of other ones. For her, it was no doubt a way of manifesting the anger she felt towards him in a physical action, but doing so did not change the past.

Even memories that are painful can still have a positive effect on us. It’s for this reason that Professor Catherine Loveday recommends keeping evidence of your past, rather than going nuclear. “Our memories are what make us who we are, and our relationships mostly better us as people,” she explains. “People will spontaneously hang on to memories of quite difficult things sometimes. We call these redemption memories. They remind us that we have survived something difficult. Take your first heartbreak, for example. At the time, it feels like the worst pain imaginable, but it’s no less painful than it would be when it happens in later life. Then, you’ve got the memory that you’ve got through it before, and intellectually and logically you can say, ‘I was happy with that person, and then it ended, and then I was happy again.’ So I think having evidence of our past can be really useful.”

There is one important exception to the rule, something that has become particularly relevant in the modern world. Holding on to images to compromise the other person, whether because they are sexually explicit or compromising in another way, is definitely unacceptable. “You should delete anything that the other person would not want you to have any more,” says Professor Loveday. “I think that’s really important, because it’s a shared history together, and you should have a shared choice.”

I can’t tell you the last time I looked at a photograph of myself and my ex together. The impulse never occurs to me. If I’m served one as a memory on my iPhone, I might look at it and then move on. It’s nice to have reminders of the past, of the good times, without getting too bogged down in the bad.