Facebook is great, isn’t it? You get to laugh a people’s pictures, message pals around the world and yes, stalk your ex. However, it’s not always quite so fun … it can get very complicated, especially after a break-up.
Is social media an important factor at the beginning & end of a relationship?
Do you delete your ex? Put them on limited profile? Stay friends? Do you want them to be able to see when you move on with someone else?
A new survey has looked at the stats around relationships ending and 42 per cent of those polled admitted that they ‘unfriended’ their ex on Facebook or unfollowed them on Twitter before they’ve been broken up for a month, while 34 per cent deleted all images of their ex.
In the survey of over 2,000 British people, as part of Diffusion’s UK Social-ology Study 2013, 31 per cent extended the ‘cleanse’ to remove their former’s loves family and friends and 34 per cent of 18 to 34 year olds happily deleted all snaps of them together, thus removing them from their digital footprint for good.
Two in three of the people questioned said they changed their status to ‘single’ within a month of their break-up, while 18 per cent said they would change it back to ‘in a relationship’ within a month of being with someone new. 30 per cent said they would post and tag pictures of a new love interest within a month of the break-up.
But what about looking at your ex’s profile? 17 per cent revealed they were happy to look at their ex’s social media profiles to establish if they had a new person in their life.
Psychologist and behavioural expert, Professor Craig Jackson, of Birmingham City University told The Daily Mail: “These findings confirm what many psychologists have suspected about those who have grown up surrounded by social media – that they fall in ‘digital love’ quickly (that is, to provide on-line confirmation and validation of a new relationship) but are just as capable of falling out of it quickly too, and with some clinical precision.
“When new romances form, the digital confirmation (e.g. Facebook status) is often viewed as THE confirmation of the new relationship that makes it both real and public. It makes sense then that this method is also used as a decisive means of confirming to the world the end of a romance.”
Hmm, what do you make of this survey? Would you delete your ex from Facebook within a month? Tell us @lovestruck
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