If breaking up is hard, breaking up online is impossible

BREAKING up may have seemed “hard to do” when Neil Sedaka first crooned the lyric in 1962, but Sedaka didn’t have to deal with the dreaded dissolution of the Facebook relationship status.

Or the awkward unfollowing of the ex’s friends. Or the reminders – on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Vine, Tumblr – that your ex is still out in the world, happy. Maybe happier than you!

In the age of social media, it turns out, breaking up is especially hard to do.

The latest evidence of this comes from researchers at the University of Miami, whose paper on how Facebook affects post-break-up recovery, particularly among people prone to melancholy, was published in the journal Computers In Human Behavior this month.

The study was simple: Tanya Tran, a clinical psychologist at Brown University, and a colleague at Miami recruited 37 students who had gotten out of a relationship recently, but were still Facebook friends with their exes. Tran then asked them questions about their Facebook use, their personalities, and how long it took them to get over their relationships.

Her findings? The students who were prone to rumination already were more likely to spend lots of time on Facebook.

And students who spent a lot of time on Facebook after a breakup, moping over things like what that person’s life is like without them, had a much more difficult time recovering.

Says Tran: “Continued exposure to one’s ex-partner through Facebook may disrupt the process of healing from a prior relationship.”

But these days we aren’t just exposed to exes on Facebook. They are everywhere: via Google search, Twitter mention, on your phone, on Instagram. Whereas changing one’s relationship status to “single” – on Facebook or IRL (in real life) – was once the primary act of decoupling, our digital lives are now so entangled that stepping away entirely entails an act of digital self-immolation.

In one 2012 survey of 100 adults aged 18 to 35, 88 percent of respondents admitted to checking out their ex’s profile after the breakup; 64 percent said they read and re-read old Facebook messages or wall posts their ex left them.

Notably, Tran doesn’t suggest that Facebook or social media are to blame. And yet, there’s no denying the fact that social media have complicated, perhaps even amplified, the trauma of breaking up: there are so many new rules, so many new accounts to unfriend and unfollow, so many new places to show off and/or fake your triumphant recovery.

Last year, Facebook data scientists found that the newly single tend to use Facebook a lot more than they did before they broke up – a sign that they’re seeking “support from their friends”, perhaps, or that they’re policing and pruning their online identity more than they did before.

In that 2012 study, almost a third of recently single respondents said they’d posted a Facebook picture just to make an ex jealous, and over half said they purged their profiles of pictures with their ex.

An entire dialogue has developed around this idea of “winning” the social media breakup, or feigning happiness and adjustment better than your ex does: change your social avatars to pictures of you “doing something awesome”, the internet suggests; unfollow him or her on social media.

“In the success theatre of breakup grief, ‘winning’ is about reaching stage five, ‘acceptance’, before your partner does,” New York’s Maureen O’Connor wrote.

“Even if you’re going on Instagrammable dates just to spite your ex, ultimately you are still, you know, going on dates.”

Contrast that to even five years ago, when advertising your current status to a former partner would have had to involve either a well-timed in real life run-in, or a fallible grapevine of gossiping human people. Now, to borrow an expression from Facebook’s default relationship options, everything is just – complicated.

It doesn’t have to be, of course. As Tran found in this new paper, the people most predisposed to dwell on a past relationship are the exact people who tend to use Facebook most. So if you’re prone to moping during hard times, the best way to “win” the social media breakup may be to log out and bow out of it. – The Washington Post