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The art of the digital breakup

By Lisa Bonos,August 23, 2012

So I went through a bad breakup recently.

It wasn’t tough because of the feelings I had for the guy. Rather it was because of the way things ended. After 10 days of silence from him, during which I calmly texted, called and e-mailed, he e-mailed me to say he was overwhelmed with work and couldn’t handle a relationship. No call, no conversation. Two months of dating — we’d met each other’s friends and were seeing each other every weekend — dissolved in one impersonal paragraph.

Of course, when was the last time you were rejected and thought: Ah, that felt good? Still, from what I’ve seen in my own dating life and what I’ve heard in conversations with other singles and relationship experts, technology has made our breakups even worse.

With so much of life happening on the Internet — and about 23 percent of couples now meeting online — it’s inevitable that “I’m just not that into you” ends up in our inboxes, sandwiched between bills, notes from our bosses and e-cards from Mom. And it’s not unheard of for Facebook users to get news about their romances when the other person changes his or her status from “in a relationship” to “single” — without talking about it first.

A digital rejection can be efficient and effective: The dumper can control the message; the dumpee can’t interrupt or argue. No body language to misread, no tears to witness, no awkward hugs and no breakup sex. But we miss out on a lot when we outsource uncomfortable conversations to our e-mail accounts. In exchange for efficiency and emotional distance, we often give up a chance for real closure — and to show the other person that you care for them and respect the effort you put into the relationship. A face-to-face breakup vs. splitting up digitally is the difference between ending a romance with a namaste bow or using a karate chop.

So where should we put the dividing line between digital and real-time rejection? Online dating consultant Laurie Davis, founder of eFlirt Expert, tells her clients that after three dates, if they want to cut things off, they should call. Not surprisingly, a lot of them disagree. “In such a digital society,” Davis says, “our fallback is that we have any difficult conversation by e-mail or text.”

Or we avoid the conversation altogether, which can be even rougher than outright rejection. A 30-year-old D.C. lawyer who had been on a few dates with a woman who didn’t respond to his texts said that, instead of silence, he would have preferred a simple message turning him down.

“I’d rather have people tell me straight up why something isn’t working out,” he said. Otherwise, “my mind will go to the most negative place.”

Some digital breakups, though, can take you to a positive place. A 28-year-old D.C. nonprofit worker I recently spoke with received an “I’m just not feeling it” note that was so kind, she said, that she didn’t mind that the rejection was digital. A man she’d been out with three times complimented her for being “an amazing combination of fun, attractive and smart” but said that he felt “there’s something missing.” He ended by apologizing for delivering the news by e-mail but said that he wanted to express how he was feeling — and he’s better at doing that in writing. He also offered to discuss it more in person if she wanted.

She liked the note so much that she used it as an outline for the next digital breakup — one she initiated — and she’s even passed it along to about five friends who’ve used it, too. They began referring to it as “the breakup e-mail template,” she said.

Another 27-year-old D.C. dater has a digital breakup script that is short enough to send via text or Gchat: “Now just isn’t a great time to be dating. I’m just going to focus on my non-romantic relationships.” She developed the terse rejection note with a friend about two years ago, she says, when she was casually dating and was “trying to find a way to end things nicely . . . and digitally.”

Of course, the problem is when a digital rejection is more callous than nice.

Ilana Gershon, an associate professor of communication and culture at Indiana University, says a breakup text or e-mail is often just the beginning of a conversation — the 21st-century version of “We need to talk” — that might lead to an in-person meeting. But that transition is rarely smooth. In her 2010 book, “The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media,” Gershon writes about a young man who initiated a breakup conversation with his girlfriend via text message. Because the couple had used texting only for joking around, the woman didn’t know if he was serious. Once he confirmed (via text, of course) that he was, she had no interest in continuing the conversation.

No surprise, the consensus among the undergraduates Gershon has surveyed is that a digital breakup equals a bad breakup.