Spring Relationshi[t] Reprise

One of my friends recently wrote an article about being dumped in the spring, which made me reminisce to an earlier time in my life, a time when I too went through a break-up during spring. She had been a grad-school roommate for a moment before we started dating. She became my first live-in girlfriend, and the split was messy. Right before she had started dating me, though, she had met someone online and gone on a date or two with the woman, a woman with whom she would later really hit it off.



Now I won't go into gory details about how I should have been more independent and less selfish [read: I should have not used my ex's old roommie's expulsion from law school to squat in the then "free" second bedroom] and not dated her at all. Or at least I should have owned up to my true feelings and fears when it became apparent to me [and to her] that it wasn't working 7 or so months before we broke up. [I had a summer job that took me away from her for a while, and I wasn't too phased about it.] And I probably don't need to examine the awkward part in the end, when I was sleeping on the futon with the cats in the living room of our 1-bedroom when my ex starting dating the online girl again. Web girl didn't sleep over while I was there or anything, but  I was still crazy jealous [read: an emotionally unstable email and secret blog voyeur] of something I didn't even want. No, I'll leave those parts out.

After all the dust settled, we did what most women-who-date-women do: we introduced each other to our new girlfriends and continued to grow the entangled web of friend[?]ship until it feels like there isn't a cool queer woman within a 53-mile radius whose intricate dating history we haven't already learned or been a part of. In my experience, I've noticed that besides an untimely death, there are only two real ways in which you can pull yourself off this map once you've started. 1) You move to another state to be with  a woman who hasn't dated at least two of your ex's. 2) You and your girlfriend become recluses, shadows, rumors of your old outgoing selves. You stop answering any invitations from other queer women to socialize or celebrate, and you don't extend any invitations of your own. If either of these is followed long enough, you will have successfully been forgotten or labeled "too boring to remember."

Unfortunately, these two tried and true paths are becoming more and more unreliable with constant daily interruptions from the online social networking world. A few years ago I managed to find a woman outside of the DC women-who-date-women web [not entirely off the web, but on a distant enough ring that I felt comfortable] and moved to Long Island to be with her, thus taking myself onto a similarly distant outside ring of the DC web [pathway #1]. Now, my ex--from my version of the "Spring Relationship Shit-Can"--before I had moved from DC, had already successfully taken herself off the main web via pathway #2. And yet, years down the road with distance and life separating us, I hear from my partner, who saw it on the Facebook page of my best-friend's ex, that my ex and her partner now of several years [originally the online date] are now going to get married in DC because Maryland [where they live] will now recognize it.

Knowing that I've already taken myself out of the DC web, a chore in the first place, my question is do I now have a responsibility to congratulate these two old friends [the ex being one of them] via the new social media. Or do I continue to pretend that I don't know [ just because a cadre of my FB friends know and have made comments about the engagement doesn't mean I should, or does it]? I think what bothers me about staying silent is that it looks like I don't care. Not that I imagine they are in a huff about who has given them kudos and who hasn't, but if it were to ever cross their minds, they would have to assume that I did see it on FB [being the nature of the beast] or heard it somewhere, and that I just didn't give a hoot. This is not the case. I am excited. I am thrilled that "my kind" are getting rights and recognition somewhere. Yet, I'm not sure this is a large enough reason to get all web-stalky on their announcement [clearly?] unintended for me-types.

And if I don't say something now--because it would most likely be an awkward statement [less intimate wall post or more creepy e-message] at the end of an awkward pause [the time between when the announcement hit FB versus the time I choose to acknowledge it]--does there become a time when it would be awkward for me not to say something?

I realize part of this problem is the inherent issue of the queer women dating web in general and part of this problem is the way I am still somehow tethered to numerous communities all over the US. Any thoughts on when it becomes appropriate or not appropriate to congratulate the engagement of your ex to the woman who stole the girl you didn't realize you didn't want?

For now, I've taken the role of seemingly ignorant ex who overthinks the non-essential into 900 word articles on a self-indulgent blog. The only way I think I could be more annoying would be to start using ridiculous web-writing-only speech. Please advise.