There’s no question social media is great for sharing photos with friends and keeping in touch with loved ones.
But having constant access to people’s life updates on Facebook or Instagram can sometimes be problematic, particularly for those who are going through a breakup.
Certainly, seeing a notification that an ex-partner is now “in a relationship” or vacation snaps from when you were together popping up on the memories function can make a tricky time even more painful.
And according to new research conducted by University of Colorado Boulder, breaking up is definitely harder to do in the digital age.
“Before social media, break-ups still sucked, but it was much easier to get distance from the person,” said doctoral student and lead author Anthony Pinter. “It can make it almost impossible to move on if you are constantly being bombarded with reminders in different places online.”
For the study, the team recruited 19 participants who had experienced an upsetting encounter online involving a break-up within the past 18 months and interviewed them for over an hour.
Regarding the results, they found that even when people took every measure possible to remove their exes from their online lives, social media returned them – often multiple times a day.
“A lot of people make the assumption that they can just unfriend their ex or unfollow them and they are not going to have to deal with this anymore,” the researcher added. “Our work shows that this is not the case.”
While some apps like Facebook have a Take a Break feature, which detects when a user switches from “in a relationship” to “single” and asks if they want the platform to hide that person’s activities, not all users are aware of the function.
But for those wanting to rid their online lives of exes, Pinter recommends unfriending, untagging, using Take a Break, and blocking.
“(Though your best bet is to) take a break from social media for a while until you are in a better place,” he insisted.
