Getting dumped is the shittiest of the shit. After all, someone you really like, or possibly even love, has just told you that the last thing they want to keep looking at is your dumb face. Or maybe you already can’t stand the fucker — it still sucks when they beat you to the finish line. And this is why it’s no surprise whatsoever to any dumpee that no one cares WHY they just got dumped, all they can think about is HOW you did it — at least initially. Hey, this is the one time the messenger deserves to get shot, amirite?
This is what an associate prof of communication and culture at Indiana University in Bloomington found through research about breakup methods among the wily American undergrads of today. With a swoon-worthy paper title that kinda makes me wish I were in college again for a sec called “Everytime We Type Goodbye: Heartbreak American Style,” Ilana Gershon found through interviewing 77 people about their breakups that:
…when American college students tell their breakup stories, they consist of a string of conversations, and people always describe when anyone switched media to continue the conversations.
“The medium used for the conversation mattered enough to be almost always mentioned,” Gershon said. “People would invariably mark when a different medium was used, explaining when communication shifted from voicemail to texting to Facebook and then to phone.”
In the annals of your ability to break up like a non-asshole whose severance methods won’t be discussed with a complete stranger for the sake of science, just keep in mind, breaker-uppers — and you know exactly who you are, ya fucks — that your dumpee is silently, perhaps even unconsciously noting exactly how you did the deed. That you ended the affair that, sure, had some problems, but was almost about to turn a corner, with a fuckin’ smiling turd emoji + a thumbs down.
It is important to note that in countries like Japan and Britain, dumpees seem to care less about delivery methods, and more about the extent to which the breaker-upper was able to justify the relationship’s end.
Character was the emphasis overseas, not the method. “The American undergraduates I interviewed were not discussing their breakups in terms of the right balance of dependence, or even the kind of people who might break up,” Gershon added.
“The closest an interviewee came to describing herself as a particular type of person was a woman who decided not to show anyone else the text breakup message her ex had sent her. Even this example shows that U.S. undergraduates were using the ‘how’ of the breakup as the narrative frame to explore what an end of the relationship might mean for them.”
But I would like to add a big fat asterisk right here and mention that the WAY you dump someone IS a reflection of character. These things are intertwined. The nicest, most considerate break-up text message of all time is still a big digital fuck you from the same person who made you listen to all their shitty punk records for the last eight months.
Mostly, though, people in Gershon’s study who’d been dumped in documented-with-media ways felt they had a smoking gun: Hard proof of the other person’s awfulness, which could be used to solicit commiserating, pity, sympathy and all the other things any human needs in spades after being dumped, particularly so unceremoniously.
That’s right: The social media dump-off is evidence to be forever whipped out and used to mock your insensitivity for years to come, or at least as long as you have that phone/account.
And though I think it’s interesting to see the way we move from in-person talking to screen-conveying in a lot of different aspects of our lives, it’s also important to note that breakup stories have always come with battle scars in one form or another that we like to show off.
None of this can be discussed without invoking the Sex and the City episode “The Post-It Always Sticks Twice.”