Does Facebook Make It Harder to Heal a Broken Heart?
Relationship experts often say the fastest and easiest way to get over someone is to make a clean break — essentially erase the person from your consciousness. But with the advent of social media, that’s getting harder and harder to do.
And it seems we’re bringing a lot of the anguish on ourselves.
A study conducted by Western University master’s student Veronika Lukacs found that almost 90 percent of Facebook users who’ve experienced a breakup in the past year keep an eye on their exes using the social networking site.
Another third of people said they’ve posted photos that they hoped would make their ex jealous, and three-quarters of Lukacs’ study subjects even added insult to injury by scoping out the pages of people they believe are now involved with their former partners.
And if you think unfriending and/or blocking someone will stop that, think again: seven in 10 admitted to using a mutual friend’s log-in credentials to gain access to things you’d rather they didn’t.
“What I found was that whether you were on Facebook all the time or not, your distress level changed based on how much surveillance you were doing [post break-up],” Lukacs said.
In other words, to heal that broken heart a little faster, maybe it’s time to shut off the computer.