Announcing Heartbreak

There are plenty of reasons I should just be done with Facebook – not the least of which is the fact that I have succumbed to its time wasting gravitational pull.  By the time I\’m done playing Facebook poker, checking up on how fat my friends from high school are, and combing through the pithy status messages, full hours of my life can vanish, never to return.

So it seems somewhat strange that such a little thing soured me on Facebook so quickly tonight.  I have a \”friend\” on here that I actually don\’t really know that well.  But among the dozens of new \”updates\” I get from people I know, this little tidbit was tucked in there: her relationship with her boyfriend has just ended.  And how do I know?  I saw this:

And there it is.  It\’s just over.

It just seems so impersonal, so cold.  Relationships are complicated things – sometimes we can\’t believe how in love we are, and sometimes staying together seems less plausible than pulling a train car with your teeth.  But the gut-wrenching end of a relationship is now represented by a few pixels on my computer screen in the form of a broken heart.  Is this really how we express our feelings now?  This is what we\’ve become?

I tried to think of hypothetical scenarios in this relationship that probably occurred.  There was probably the time where they drank and laughed together at the UW Union, when they both knew that they were meant for each other.  But then there was the visit from her old high school boyfriend that caused them to argue.  But then they probably went to her friend\’s wedding, soaked in the spirit of couplehood, and everything was forgiven.

But there it is – the broken heart icon.  And now it\’s all gone.  Because Facebook tells me so.  And just like that, it\’s time to move on.  A clean break has been made.  All the good times, all the bad times – boiled down to an icon, buried in a hundred news feed articles about how crazy it was that girls used so much hairspray in high school.

Pretty soon, you\’ll see Facebook news articles like this:

Christian Schneider just found out he has three weeks to live!

Christian Schneider just found out the U.S. is under nuclear attack from Iran!