By T.J. DeGroat

Imagine it: You've finally made the heart-wrenching decision to end a relationship. After those final awkward days, both you and your partner emerge beaten up and depressed. But the weeks go by and you slowly begin to feel the post-break up fog lift. You're even thinking about throwing your hat back in the ring ... when you stumble across your ex's new profile on Friendster. Or a flirtatious testimonial on his or her Myspace page. Maybe an innocent looking link leads you to his or her recently created blog.

It's hard enough to recover from love gone bad, but thanks to the Internet, it sometimes is impossible for a tech-savvy single to avoid an ex.

Of course, run-ins are bound to happen offline as well. There's the inevitable and awkward moment when you bump into your ex at the neighborhood coffee shop or at a party. And you regularly hear about each other from mutual friends, whether you'd like to or not.

But now your sacred online time is being taken from you, as well. When you log onto the social-networking site du jour you have to worry about coming across an ex's profile, wondering whether anyone else has left a more-than-friendly comment or whether the relationship status has been changed from "single" to "in a relationship" (or worse: "it's complicated." Does that mean he or she still loves you or is some other biatch in the picture?!).

Sure, Friendster is a fun site that helps people find long-lost friends and meet new ones, but what about the ghosts with whom you don't want to reconnect?

Another potential problem: This ever-expanding blogosphere somehow manages to remain small. And it's just a matter of time before you click the wrong link, the one that brings you to that personal web site, where you can read all about your ex's life, post-you.

From there, there's about a 50-50 chance you'll link to a Flickr account, where a new love affair could be documented in full color. You could feel completely content with your own life, yet be sent into a downward spiral after browsing through a photo album full of shots from a seemingly romantic weekend in the country.

These online discoveries aren't always random, of course. With technology at our fingertips, the urge to cyberstalk is strong. When you sign on to instant messenger, you can see whether your ex is online. You wonder why your ex is not sending you a friendly message, or worse, you worry that your ex has taken you off of the buddy list altogether.

And once a blog is discovered, you may feel like checking for a new post every hour on the hour. But don't. Software to track visitors to a web site is very easy to install. Every obsessive reload is registered on your ex's log.

Not that I know much about this. If I were to shed a (now less than) significant other who happens to have profiles on every photo-sharing, social-networking and blogging site on the net, I certainly wouldn't spend my nights furiously typing out the URLs by memory.

Nope, not me.

I'd be too busy doctoring photos of my own faux romantic getaways to upload to Flickr, Blogspot, Myspace and Friendster.