Let's face it: Breakups suck.

But in the era of social media where Facebook friends morph within nanoseconds into real-time lovers, then descend just as quickly into frenemy territory, splits and their attendant issues now live on the World Wide Web for all your so-called "friends" to see and engage with. News about relationship difficulties, alleged infidelity, outright cheating [1], divorce battles, and garden variety breakups [2] that used to reside in the private domain between two people and maybe a handful of close friends can be spread farther and faster than a rhinovirus in winter. Aided and abetted by web-based and wireless technology, breakups, dissing your ex, and nailing a cheating partner can get downright nasty.

In the on-demand world of text messaging, moment-to-moment Twitter updates, blogging, instant messaging, email, and continuous RSS feeds, relationship vicissitudes can be logged, and by the same token, monitored, with the exacting precision of a military campaign. And with myriad computer software applications and websites, uncovering (and unloading) cheating, lying, two-faced lovers is as easy as a pointing and clicking.

Which all begs the question: Is technology changing the nature—and the frequency of—the breakup?

Public Domain
Sixteen-year-old Amalia Rudnik, a dating newbie who's had two boyfriends break up with her on Facebook, says the "status" box where people indicate whether they're "in a relationship," "single," or "it's complicated," can easily be used as a weapon, as well as the "wall" on your profile page and the graffiti application.

"If you're friends with someone and you can see their profile, when they break up with someone everyone will know you've broken up—your whole network of friends will know." It's important, she says, to update your status after a breakup or friends will think you're still pining for the guy who broke up with you. It happened to her. While breakup No. 1 occurred offline, her ex changed his Facebook status right away to "single," while hers remained unchanged for hours: "You don't want to look like an idiot."

The ex-boyfriend made fun of Rudnik by drawing a picture of her with the graffiti application and posting it on his profile. She had to ask a friend to convince him to remove it. Rudknik also says Facebook and MySpace groups often form instantaneously to gang up on either side in a breakup [3] or campaign to humiliate someone.

Forget about Ms. Manners or civility. Etiquette? What etiquette? Technology has enabled everyone to take the easy way out via text message, instant message, email, voicemail, blog post, and even online video hubs like YouTube.

Using instant messages and texts [4] to end a personal relationship can be less viral than turning to Facebook or MySpace, though people can forward messages to a group in their BlackBerry or cell phone address book. According to the findings of a global study commissioned by Skype and Harris Interactive, 21% of the men ages 18-24 surveyed feel the new forms of communication encourage less honesty and openness. The study found that 81% of respondents said face-to-face communication is still the most acceptable way to end a relationship, while 7% said doing so via email was acceptable and 3% said via IM was acceptable.

Think it's just teenagers and young adults who are reeling from the new breakup modes? Think again.

Patti Wood, a 49-year-old Atlanta-based body language expert, trainer and speaker, recently experienced a breakup over email after three dates that were interspersed with continuous phone contact and email. The man she'd been dating initiated the breakup by asking a few personal questions and apparently, she says, not liking the answers he received.

"I felt devastated and made to feel less than, or not worthy of a face-to-face interaction. We weren't physical in any way, but it felt so cold and inappropriate to the level of self-disclosure and connection," Wood explains.

Given her professional training, she was all the more surprised by the curveball. "It was a lesson learned for me in that I got pulled into that emailing relationship world for the first time as a major form of trying to communicate [with a potential partner] even with all of my knowledge."

What a Tangled (World Wide) Web We Weave
Technology rules in the fictional world as well. In USA Network's mini series The Starter Wife, Gracie Pollock is dumped by cell phone by her boy/man of a movie producer husband just before her 10th wedding anniversary.

Social network sites like DontDateHimGirl.com [5] offer women a place to exchange information and compare notes about men they're dating. The site started as a tell-all venue for women to wave red flags about their experiences with specific cads but is now a basic relationships and dating site.

The web, it seems, is being used for everything from trash-talking exes post-breakup to confirming a partner is cheating via computer software. There are even websites that create random phone numbers where you can send messages to your partner from a fake person to see if he or she is carrying on an affair. SpoofTel.com [6] offers the ability to change your Caller ID information to show any phone number you want, change your voice to male or female, record the conversation or text message, and your real number won’t show up on the Caller ID screen. You can even capture a user name and password, then do a reverse phone lookup on the Web.

To monitor sites a partner visits, email, IM, and other online activities, Spectorsoft Internet [7] monitoring software ($99) checks everything, including screen captures, about every two seconds and all keystrokes.

Women also use Facebook, MySpace and other sites to find the "other woman." Take the case of "T" Bodnar of Hoboken, N.J., who was outed on MySpace a year ago by an ex-girlfriend he dated for five years, and his most recent girlfriend whom he's since broken up with. Bodnar, 38, drummer in the cover band Lifespeed, was in the process of trying to end the newer relationship after he resumed contact with his ex. Both women found out about each other and found one another on MySpace. The women began texting and sending photos back and forth.

The episode, Bodnar says, "really made me look like a piece of s**t. I didn't feel good about this. I was trying to walk away quietly but within a couple of hours on MySpace, they were connected and trash-talking me." The women left nasty messages on the band's home page and blog.

"I felt kind of violated and that my privacy was worthless and because I wasn't exactly being a stand-up guy [by talking to both and having feelings for both], I was very embarrassed. I had no control of the situation," he explains.

Last year in the uber-cool blogging world, a relationship between bloggers Moe Tkacik and Richard Blakeley, both of Gawker Media, exploded into the public domain and turned ugly post-breakup. Tkacik had written an unflattering account of the couple's liaison on her personal blog. Blakeley retaliated by posting a video of himself simulating sex with a dead fish.

"The stakes are really high. Technology is used so regularly now not only to uncover what's going on with relationships, but you can go online and send a text message from a number that's not your number," says Danine Manette, author of Ultimate Betrayal: Recognizing, Uncovering and Dealing With Infidelity [8].

"I think with the advances in technology and the ability to know in real time the whereabouts of the person you're looking for, we're going to see more and more vengeful assaults. It's going to get ugly," says Manette, who's also a criminal investigator with a law degree.

Indeed, technology changes everything, but old-fashioned gumshoe tactics remain effective to catch cheating spouses or partners. Jerry Palace—a former New York City police detective—runs Check a Mate [9], which specializes in matrimonial investigations. He conducts GPS tracking, background investigations, uses hidden cameras and other methods to confirm cheating.

"The big thing today is following them. Years ago, we sent decoys, you sent a girl to somebody's boyfriend or husband," Palace notes. He says legally, there are now more restrictions on what he can do with phone and financial records and bills so "we've gone back to the basics— it's surveillance."

Most of his clients, like Mary, whose name is changed to protect her identity, use the tactic to confirm what they already know, to confirm "that they're not crazy."

"When somebody calls me, it's almost like a Playbill, there's a whole cast of characters," says Palace. "They say 'I just want to know if I'm crazy.' The investigation reinforces what they already know."

Divorce Courting
The pervasiveness of text messaging, email, the six degrees of separation afforded by social networks like Facebook and MySpace, hard-drive tracking, and the ease with which video networks like YouTube enable exes to badmouth each other to the Internet-surfing public at large, make breakups more loaded than ever and make grounds for divorce all the more accessible.

Take the scorched earth strategy of 52-year-old Patricia Walsh-Smith [10], a playwright and former actress who is the estranged wife of Philip Smith, president of the Shubert Theater organization. Engaged in a nasty, high-stakes divorce case, this spring she posted several videos on YouTube where she revealed that Smith, 25 years her senior, wouldn't have sex with her claiming problems with high blood pressure. The shocker: She tells the web-viewing public that she discovered a stash of Viagra, condoms, and porn magazines in the couple's apartment. The videos racked up nearly 200,000 views.

Patricia Walsh-Smith's video stylings apparently had no impact on the outcome of her divorce case. On July 21, a judge ruled that she has just 30 days to vacate the Park Ave. apartment she once shared with her estranged husband Smith. The judge also ruled that she'd have to settle for the $750,000 she agreed to in the prenup. The judge said she inflicted "cruel and inhuman" treatment on Smith by taking her case to the Internet.
All supermodel Christie Brinkley [11] needed in her recent divorce case was an open court room, along with well-documented evidence of ex-husband Peter Cook's Internet porn habit. While she employed old-fashioned offline gumshoes to tail Cook, the case settled before the investigators' reports came to light.

In divorce cases, laws vary from state to state as to what evidence is admissible in court. Courts in some states can subpoena the information from hard drives and cell phone cards. In most divorce cases, there are some kinds of electronic evidence-gathering methods.

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick faces potential perjury charges after claiming under oath that he didn't have an affair with a city employee. However, proof of the affair was discovered in thousands of flirtatious text messages to his former staffer. It remains unclear as to whether the messages were accessed illegally but if they were obtained legally, the content can be admitted into court.

There are ways to clone computer hard drives and there are even computer programs that can download data stored on a memory card that resides in cell phones.

Colt Taylor, computer repair technician in Boca Raton, Florida, was called to a woman's house for what he thought would be a routine call for virus protection. Instead, he was asked by the visibly angry woman to clear all instances of her estranged husband or boyfriend (she didn't indicate which) from the hard drive and remove his "favorites." Taylor did so, no questions asked. "She was just grateful to get rid of the data."

As for the drummer, there is a happy ending: Bodnar plans to present the ex-girlfriend, who's now his current girlfriend, with an engagement ring later this year. We'll be on the lookout for the YouTube video proposal...