[Sidebar: File this one under things we already know but now have academic research to back it up.]
A recently published study conducted by the University of Miami has officially confirmed that staying friends with your ex-partner on Facebook can make a breakup that much harder.
[FLASHBACK: Facebook Relationship Etiquette: 5 Things You SHOULD & SHOULD NOT Do…]
While I’m sure most of you would claim that you want them to ‘see you doing good without them,’ the fact of the matter is… they either care too much or probably don’t care as much you do.
Ok… let’s use Chris Brown and Karreuche Tran‘s recent public spectacle?as an example…
I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Brown has a 9 month old kid that was fathered during his relationship with Karreuche and now they’ve broken up and she’s living the ‘single life’ without him. ?Partying it up in Miami and showing off her bikini body.
The pair apparently still follow and/or stalk each other on social media and as Karreuche was getting her THOT swimsuit pose on, Brown decides to blast her online with the following…
Well… Brown & Karreuche and nameless other couples have all proven that this latest study about keeping your ex around on social media is true!
Published last month in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, PhD student Tanya Tran recruited 37 undergrad students who had recently ended a relationship but hadn’t ended their Facebook friendship with that ex.
Tran then asked those students about their Facebook usage, breakup recovery time, and general personality.
Tran, now a clinical psychologist at Brown, found that people who had a disposition toward rumination (i.e. to focus a lot of attention on their distresses) were particularly prone to using Facebook to increase their despair.
Viewing their ex’s Facebook page or seeing their updates in their newsfeed led to thoughts of what the ex’s lives were like without them and lead to harder post-breakup recovery time.
Have you seen a recently single person on social media? They’re pretty much horrible for anyone to follow, let alone their ex. “Out with my girls #LivingMyBestLife.” “So glad I have time again to take the gym seriously #GettingSwoll.” “With nothing holding me back, the world is mine #Inspiration.” Those people are temporarily insufferable. (source)
So the point of if all is… if you’re prone to feeling sorry for yourself (or are prone to lashing out publicly online) it’s best to UN-friend that ex on Facebook! ?And while this particular research doesn’t specifically mention it, you should probably delete and/or block them from Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, and whatever social media pops up next week too.
Last year research out of the at University of Western Ontario in Canada found that the person who initiates the breakup is less likely to be troubled by their ex’s social media activity than the person who was dumped. Sixty-two percent of dumpees said they spent a lot of time thinking about and reanalyzing wall posts and messages from their exes. They also said that posting about the breakup brought in messages from friends and families that tended to reopen wounds.
Most said they didn’t want to view their ex’s profile, but just couldn’t ward off the temptation and ended up feeling that the ex-partner was trying to flaunt their newly unattached status.
So the easy option would be to just hit that ‘unfriend’ button…. dontcha think?
Is it a necessity? Or merely a nuisance?