Heartbreak is 'worse in the digital age'

Heartbreak is worse in the digital age because the history of the relationship lingers in photographs and messages posted on social networking websites, researchers claim. 

Those who kept everything took longer to heal from their heartbreak

 

While spurned lovers could once tear up photographs and burn love letters, records kept on sites like Facebook are much harder to remove because of their sheer volume.

Emails and digital photographs can easily be deleted, but songs, pictures and messages posted on social networks are not so easy to erase, especially if they have been posted online by someone else.

The pervasiveness of content stored on computers, tablets and mobile phones "creates problems during a break-up" because the reminders of their relationship are ever-present, researchers said.

Psychologists from the University of California Santa Cruz interviewed 24 people aged 19 to 34 about their methods of coping after a break-up.

Presenting their findings at an Association for Computing Machinery conference in Paris last week, the researchers explained that people had difficulty trying to search through every reminder of their relationship online, meaning some chose to erase nothing at all while others simply embarked on a systematic cull of everything they could find.

Half of the participants admitted to deleting every trace possible from their digital devices and eight kept all records of their relationship intact, while just four selected which messages and photographs to delete.
Those who kept everything took longer to heal from their heartbreak, but those who disposed of everything often regretted doing so.
Devising "Pandora's Box" software which can scour online profiles for any trace of a former loved one and store them in one place – allowing users to choose which relics of their relationship to delete and which to retain – could solve the problem, the researchers proposed.