A few days ago a good friend of mine was crushed because she had been dumped over a text message. She was deeply saddened that someone who she loved couldn’t or wouldn’t take the time to talk with her in person. Her phone just vibrated, then the axe dropped: ‘Sorry this is not working out, I am moving on”. She had been in this relationship for over a year. Ouch. A breakup is hard enough as it is, but reduce the transaction to 160 characters or less, and, to me, it seems downright cruel.
In my peer group, breaking up with someone via text still inspires words like coward and jerk. In my parents day, dumping your former honey over the phone was the absolute worst. Yet, as we get further and further into the digital dating age, phone breakups are starting to sound better to me — a real voice, even minus the face, seems refreshing in a world of Twitter, Facebook, email and text.
If your last romance ended in a face-to-face conversation, count yourself blessed. We found a sad survey on the mobile social network MocoSpace that discovered that out of 20,000 people they talked to, 57 percent do their dumping over the phone, with 47 percent texting the dumpee.
Even though I think a breakup text is coldhearted, my 21 year old brother totally disagrees. Since so many of his conversations take place over text, email, IM, and online networks, getting dumped/hitched/asked out over a text seems like an everyday occurrence. Is this just a gender thing? I am involved in those means of communication too, but a text breakup seems to be the worst.
What do you think?