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My high school relationship class is in full swing having already completed 7 of our 13 sessions. I truly love my job teaching kids about healthy relationships, and I love this class. They are not easy by any means. They are outspoken and they have a lot to say. They are truthful and they are sincere ... and they are seriously challenged by the complexities of their relationships. This class is made up of sophomores, juniors and seniors. Some of them think they are Casanovas and some still apparently think the opposite sex has cooties. Two of my students are pregnant.
This week we are discussing how to recognize the red flags of unhealthy relationship behavior. And we are discussing the right way to break-up. I am asking them what they think are the worst ways to break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. The discussion is lively and animated. I let the exchange develop and then I summarize. There are lots of poor break-up choices that they fail to mention. We return to my Powerpoint presentation and I begin to list some relationship don’ts:
“Poor break-up choice number one,” I say “Do not break-up with your boyfriend or girlfriend by text message or on Facebook.” The class suddenly quiets, an uncomfortable quiet. The students are turning toward each other with an unmistakable look of guilt and amusement. They start to giggle and laugh. I suddenly get it.
“You all think it’s okay to break-up with someone online or by text, don’t you?” I accuse. “Who has used their social media to break up with someone?” I ask. One hand goes up and others continue to laugh and exclaim.
The girl who raised her hand says: “Yeah, well, my boyfriend first asked me out on Facebook. Seems like I should be able to end it that way, too!”
“How many of you have no problem breaking up with someone online?” They all raise their hands.
One student says, “I would send a [private] message, I wouldn’t do it in a status!” This is apparently the most mercy he can muster.
Here is the moment that I come to terms with our times -- the etiquette of relationships has changed, probably irreversibly, at the hands of social media. The new Seventeen magazine/Facebook survey bears this out. Seventeen magazine and Facebook teamed up to survey 10,000 teens, boys and girls aged 16 to 21, to uncover how relationships have changed since the advent of Facebook and other social media. This study indicates that 10% of the survey respondents used Facebook to break up with someone. Another Facebook poll discovered that 21% would use Facebook to break-up and 25% found out their relationship was over via a Facebook status. Now that teens are falling in love, courting (can we even still use that word?) and breaking-up on Facebook, the findings of these studies suggest that those of us trying to help teens navigate the relationship minefield might need to look at and talk about healthy relationships differently.
For example, according to my class, a typical online break-up might go something like this — the person initiating the break-up, the Dumper, let’s say in this case a boy, sends the bad news via a text message (“Im breaking up w u. Its ovr.”) Then he goes onto Facebook and changes his relationship status to “single.” Then the person who receives the text message, the Dumpee, takes to her Facebook page and voices her dissent with a status update — “You were wrong to end things that way. You know who you are. I was over you anyhow!” This (“you know who you are”) is an attempt at discretion, when in reality everybody knows the target of the status update. So friends begin to chime in with comments. First her friends --
“I always told you he was a jerk.”
“He did that to me, too, Girl. U r better off without him.”
Then his—
“If you weren’t foolin’ around on My Boy, he wouldn’t have dropped you.”
And so it goes. You’d think that the Dumper would likely not be privy to this ongoing conversation because the Dumpee would “unfriend” him. But no, according to the Seventeen magazine/Facebook study, 73% of teens keep their ex-boyfriends and girlfriends in their circle of “friends,” perhaps for the very purpose of engaging in this kind of post-break-up exchange.
For adults and parents, these kind of exchanges
