The New York Times has a story about how a conference was held to teach 200 teenagers from Boston how to have “healthy breakups”. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the discussion revolved around proper Facebook breakup etiquette.
We’ve covered how to handle the modern day breakup and even gave you the 7 steps to breaking up online before. But still, no one seems to know what’s the best way to handle online breakups. One kid said “racing to update his relationship status after a breakup” was healthy. Others said no way. Some people talked about how they learned about breakups through Facebook. While others said they have enough problems to worry about “some stupid boy breaking up with me on Facebook”.
It’s so interesting yet so utterly unsurprising that the views of what to do after your breakup can be so different. Breaking up is hard! It’s even harder now since there’s so much ‘physical’ (as in, documentable) evidence of your relationship online. Can we really expect young kids in young relationships to act like adults? Can we even expect ourselves to ‘act like adults’? What does that even mean?
The conference, which was sponsored by the Boston Public Health Commission, tried to be cool with the kids, letting them use cell phones throughout the talks and showed pictures of good celebrity breakups and bad celebrity breakups, but it still focused on the idea of “Face it, Don’t Facebook It”, which meant to break up in person and “reach an agreement” as opposed to sending a break up text or changing your status. It’s all good in theory but come on, we’re talking about kids who probably hate confrontation as much as they love Twilight. My advice to the kids: don’t get a Facebook. [NY Times]