Community: How To Break Up On Facebook

With the advent of Facebook, an important relationship milestone is when you change your relationship status on Facebook from "single" to "in a relationship." When you're "all loved up," you don't think about what happens if that relationship goes sour. That bliss you feel as you receive a flood of comments from FaceBook well-wishers is the antithesis of how you feel when you have to change your status from "in a relationship" to "single."

Breakups suck. But what's even worse is when you have to digitalize this failed union by unchecking the "in a relationship" box. An immediate, sterile, cold-hearted alert pops up that in the news feeds of 1,000 of your closest friends, family, coworkers, and former high school class mates, alerting them of your newly-single status. This action is the equivalent to setting up flares at an accident scene, putting your breakup at center stage. Alas! The floodgates are opened and, all of a sudden, your Aunt Deets, who's 65, is telling you, "you're a catch, you'll find that special someone." Or the do-gooding Facebook acquaintance splashes a series of acronyms and exclamation points on your page: "OMG!!!! WTF!!!!!!!! Deets! No bf?!?!?!" Or a random person from high school sends you a link to your nearest PAWS to adopt a cat because you're inevitably going to dry rot, alone.

What can be worse than this? When you get dumped on Facebook, you don't even get a say! All the person does is uncheck the box and POOF! Your entire relationship vanishes in one click.

This very thing happened to my girlfriend. Apparently, when she was mid-fight with her boyfriend, he didn't appreciate her uncannily accurate synopsis of him being a "self-centered bastard." With the swift click of a mouse, BAM ... she was single and de-friended. No second chances ... no explanation.

What makes Facebook breakups so bad is that they are public—stripping away the privatization of breakups. In an instant, it gives the gossip hounds some new salacious material that will leave your ears ringing until your breakup becomes "old FaceBook news."

This "ripping off the band-aid" way of breaking up potentially creates a whirlwind of wtfs, tears and Patron that may leave Facebook open to a tortuous interference with intimate relationship liability or at the very least a negligent infliction of emotional distress suit.