Facebook Is Also Not a Good Place to Break Up with Your bf/gf

Last week Kathryn had some excellent advice about not posting personal love notes to your bf/gf/crush on Facebook where everyone and their mother can see them. But sometimes it’s not the unbridled passion of new love that makes everybody on Facebook the most uncomfortable—it’s what happens when the people who spent six months posting “ILYSM BABE!!!” on each other’s walls suddenly split up. Now your Newsfeed is clogged up with two people having a meltdown in the form of Facebook status updates.

We here at Sparklife wholeheartedly sympathize with anyone going through a rough breakup—it sucks. But there are a lot of good reasons why typing “I HATE YOU DEREK” on a public forum might not be the best way to handle a bad situation.

1. It’s hard to take something back when you’ve said it to 600 people
Lots of people end up saying things they later regret in the middle of breakups, especially to their exes. Often, part of getting over a bad split is apologizing and making up for those things once you’re feeling better (and you will always eventually feel better). It’s not the easiest part of the process, but it’s an important one, and it gets a lot harder if you’ve decided to make those remarks public. Just talk to Brad and Jennifer or Jon and Kate.

2. It makes things weird for your friends
Your friends are there to help you through tough situations like this, and they’ll be a lot more eager to help if you call them and say, “Jessie, this week has really sucked. Are you free to meet up later?” than if they notice you’ve changed your profile photo to a picture of your ex getting crushed by a jumbo jet.

3. People you might want to date in the future can read this
It’s not just colleges, parents, and bosses you have to worry about when deciding whether to put something risqué on the internet: Your next potential crush might be reading it too! No one wants to date someone who’s going to wig out and write them public hate mail for six months if things don’t work out.

4. Sometimes people get back together
Especially in the topsy-turvy world of high school, many breakups last for mere days (or hours). If your Facebook friends have to see you and your sig other go from creepily cuddly to frighteningly angry every couple of weeks, you’re going to end up having your love life discussed on Lamebook.

Do you think breakups are best kept away from Facebook?