34 October 2019_Esquire illustrations: C.J. Robinson
feed. Lately, this has meant
watching a lot of BMX videos
on Instagram.
Earlier this year, I spent
a few months hooking up
with a BMX biker. (I am
cool.) During this time,
I followed him on Insta-
gram, where he almost
exclusively posted videos
of himself BMXing. He
tagged BMX publications
and BMX teams, and I fol-
lowed them, too. I decided
it would be weird to follow
the guys on his team—
known in many circles as
“his friends whom I had
never met”—but I gave in
and followed one guy any-
way, mainly because I saw
a video of him dunking a
basketball using the wheel
of his bike. I showed it to a
friend, who responded, “I
would follow him to hell.”
All of a sudden, my In-
stagram feed was largely
BMX. To be totally hon-
est, before hooking up
with this guy, I did not
know or care what BMX
was. I thought maybe it
was like snowmobiling.
Turns out it’s just biking,
and it has to do with men
grinding and bonking their pegs at skate parks or
on ramps and rails in the real world. It also turns out
that BMX is actually very interesting.
When this guy and I decided to call things off, I
didn’t unfollow him or any of the BMX accounts.
By that point, they were some of my favorite things
on Instagram. Watching any video of any dude rail-
hopping any fence is much better than seeing screen-
shots of people’s tweets.
It feels a bit weird to be so into something solely
because of someone I was romantically linked to.
I’m afraid that I’m “watching boys do stuff ” instead
of pursuing my own interests, or that I’m obsessing
over the thing they introduced me to as a metonym
for them. But we all get into things because of ro-the Big BiteYou can’t shoot
people into space
once you’re done
with them, and you
can’t magically
erase them from
your brain.
Ending a relationship in 2019 involves a lot of un-
following. To get over someone, common wisdom
holds, you can’t have little reminders of them pop-
ping up on your phone nonstop. So you delete their
number and you block each other on social media and
RELATIONSHIPS
TO UNFOLLOW OR
NOT TO UNFOLLOW
In the digital age, sharing
custody of interests isn’t easy
By Blythe Roberson