Because ghosting is sooo 2024.

Ah, Valentine’s Day. An era designed for Ferris strawberry lovers, $6 champagne, and frat basements filled with couples you’re a little scared of. But perhaps the scariest part of the season is the sudden, dramatic reappearance of your ex. This year, we’re taking it up a notch. We’re no longer doing the glance and ignore across campus, because that’s fucking boring. Instead, we’re turning to literature. The arts. How would the creative mind break no contact? How can they defy all odds and genuinely be so weird you have to write a Bwog article about it? Here’s some of my favorites: compiled from friends, lovers, and the mind of this author 25 minutes into a melatonin gummy.

1. They write a message in the snow outside your dorm
Imagine this: you live in the Quad/Furnald/John Jay/fill in the blank. You wake up on Valentine’s Day, look out your dorm window to see “I miss u” scrawled across the slushy lawn. Romantic? Desperate? Who cares. Your ex probably thought this was a great public display of affection. Maybe you can do that in other ways, babe?

2. Messaging on Partiful
This is a small fucking school. Sometimes, you RSVP to the same things as your opps. So why not take the OPPortunity (see what I did there) to reconnect? This works because you don’t think to block people on this platform and it’s spooky enough that if your ex DID contact you via your Partiful feed, it’s so insane you have to laugh.

3. They attend Lerner Pub and wink at you across Roone
Enough said.

4. They text you to bemoan recent executive orders
The political stress bonding? A weak excuse to get back in touch. We must stay vigilant! They’re not looking for a protest partner, they’re looking for closure.

5. Your ex writes a screenplay based on your brief situationship with an over sexualized love interest based on you and emails it to you with no context
This is very Barnardcore. This is hot. This is steamy. This is LES dive bar that has free jazz nights on Tuesdays. Alternatively, they publish a nonfiction essay about you under a pseudonym. Then they send a self-published poetry book to your address.

6. Write a song about you and then release it to an audience of mutual friends until it gets back to you via Spotify Daylist
This is the equivalent of me writing a Bwog article. Also (and I’m gonna make an NYU reference here bear with me) this is very Clive-Davis.

7. They text you and let you know that in the year where you didn’t talk, they got married AND divorced and then ask if you want to come hang
I actually had to ask my friend who told me this if it was real or not. It’s real.

8. They make a not so subtle “miss you” playlist on Spotify – alternatively, they are the ONLY like on one of your playlists
Like yeah, my music taste is better than yours. But the lurking is insane. Someday Spotify is going to come out with an equivalent of the “viewed your profile” thing on TikTok and it’s going to be OVER for y’all.

9. They suggest going axe throwing together
Gets rid of the pent-up resentment? A physical target to redirect your wicked words previously directed at each other. Also gay subtext.

10. They bribe the Datamatch and Marriage Pact people to pair you together
This is the opposite of that feature where you submit UNIs you don’t want to be paired with.

11. Last but not least, they send you an email
Basic, to be sure. Hence the last one on the list. But if they’ve been blocked on every other platform, it’s the only thing that’ll work. Plus, it’s giving girlboss expanding their #Columbia network whose only social life is their LinkedIn connections. Even easier if they write it with ChatGPT! Bonus points if they “send their support” about your dead dad. (True story.)

Image via Bwarchives