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Breaking up is complicated in a digital age

by Amol Sharma
Wall Street Journal
Mar. 27, 2006 10:42 AM

A few days after breaking up with his boyfriend, Jeff Ramone couldn't resist logging on to Friendster - a popular online social community - to check out his ex's profile page. Two things caught him off guard: Ramone had already been deleted as a "friend" and his ex had updated his status to "single" from "in a relationship."

"I was about to do the same," says Ramone, a 32-year-old massage therapist from the Chicago area. "He just beat me to it." Ramone then did his part to sever ties: He removed his former partner as a "buddy" on his computer's real-time Instant Messenger service, erased his information from his email contact list, and purged his cell phone number. advertisement

Splitting up with a boyfriend or girlfriend wasn't always this complicated. But the digital age has bound people together in ever more complex ways, making it tough for lovers old and new to completely disconnect.

Among the rituals: bowing out of email lists, updating online profiles, and clearing cellphone memories of phone numbers and old text messages. The electronic connections can endure, awkwardly, long after the breakup.

Susan Plummer and Brian Snow called it quits a few months before both landed Peace Corps volunteer posts abroad in the summer of 2003. The two barely kept in touch. Then in November of 2004, Snow, 26, copied her on a mass email about how he'd proposed to someone else. "My offer was accepted after some hysterics and we plan on getting married when we return to the States," Snow wrote.

In the ensuing months, Plummer, 25, says Snow sent several batches of photos as part of mass emails: the engagement party, holiday travels and various pictures of Snow's fiancee. As a final indignity, she received a Web link to 352 images from the wedding. Snow says he thought the mass emails were a way to stay in touch "without having to talk to the other person directly." The emails eventually stopped, and the two now say they are on good terms.

Courtney Reed, a 30-year-old economic-development consultant in New York, says she met someone through Jewish dating site JDate.com and went on just one date before politely brushing off the suitor. A day later, she received a mass email from the gentleman celebrating the birth of his nephew. The next week she received two more emails recommending accessories for Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod. Reed had seen enough, and asked to be removed from his email list.

Some exes are unwittingly reunited in cyberspace. One Philadelphia couple of 29 years got divorced and both the ex-husband and ex-wife posted profiles on JDate.com, entering in details such as their age, education, marital status and location. Shortly after signing up, the ex-wife says, she received a message from the site declaring her a match with her ex-husband.

The cell phone is usually among the first items that need cleansing. Wireless-handset maker Nokia Corp. even touches on the idea in a TV ad that features a woman named Jill, who says cellphone-number deletion is a sort of post-breakup therapy. "It is so great because when you go to the phone and you delete (the number) and your phone asks 'Are you sure?' You look at your phone and you're like, oh yeah, I'm sure," she says in the ad. Forgetting to delete a former partner's digits can make for some awkward moments. A month after breaking up with his girlfriend, Steven Rovery, a 23-year-old New York-area graphic artist, called his ex from a bar in what he calls "a drunk incident." With her number still stored in his phone, he instinctively scrolled down to her name and hit "send." He says he got no answer - and was embarrassed the next morning when his ex, whose phone indicated he had called, sent him a scolding text message. Even when a breakup is complete, the Internet makes it much easier - and therefore more tempting - to find out what a former partner is up to.

People track down old flames using search engines like Google and they troll wedding-registry sites such as TheKnot.com to see who their past honeys have ended up marrying. Debra Burrell, a New York-based therapist and founder of the Mars-Venus Counseling Center, says people check social networking sites such as Friendster and News Corp.'s MySpace.com, as well as Internet dating haunts, to see if their ex has met someone new. "They monitor the other person's progress in re-entering the dating world," Ms. Burrell says.

Among the breakup tips offered by the Web site soyouvebeendumped.com are several technological tasks, including purging cell phone numbers and "buddy list" handles on instant-messenger services. The site, launched in 2000 and based in Glasgow, Scotland, also says old emails should be deleted or burned to a CD so obsessive types "won't be tempted to continually reread each one over and over."

"Today's information technologies record such a large amount of data, often with little or no effort from users," says Jonathan Lillie, an associate professor of new media at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

"To delete someone from your life can actually be quite a hassle." Lillie, 33, recently went through a divorce and says his own case is instructive. He still needs to clean up some "digital skeletons" such as photos of his ex-wife and the files she kept on his computer. He'll then have to update his password on most computers and Internet sites, which is currently his ex-wife's nickname. "I still haven't changed it, just because it's going to be a big pain," Lillie says. "Although I know eventually I'll push myself to do it."