The Evolution of Millennial Breakups

In a span of only two days, I learned about two different friends of mine who had recently broke up with their significant other. This is hardly uncommon at my age nowadays, being that most of the people I know are either in their late twenties or in their thirties which this is usually that point in life where you’re either settling down or breaking up — After all, casually dating eventually becomes mind-numbing, redundant, and frankly, a whole lot less fun than it was in earlier youth.

However, as many of us may now know, dating and the entire nature of relationships in general has drastically changed. It’s a whole new playing field, so to speak, especially since many individuals now treat it exactly like that— A game.

With the evolution of social media and the internet, doing anything online has become much quicker and more efficient. Included in that progression is dating.

Love stories don’t quite start out the same as they used to. Romantically meeting someone in a purely organic way such as at the supermarket or at a coffee shop, though still very possible, isn’t as common as it used to be. Instead, love stories now start out with a simple claim of, “I swiped right!” And from there, it’s history.

However, the rapidness in which relationships dissolve has quickly caught up to rapidness in how they began in the first place. We are now breaking up nearly as quickly as we got together. But, it always seems like things fall apart quicker than the time it takes to put it back together — Or at least, that used to be the case.

It’s been argued that the amount of time it takes to get over a breakup is half the time that you were in the relationship. If that’s true, then my two friends who had recently gone through breakups of their own would still be in bed, sobbing in fetal position, while simultaneously eating bon-bons.

Instead, I learned that they were already starting to “talk” to new people after a matter of only a few weeks post-breakup. I was slightly shocked, having known the amount of time they were with their ex.

But, gone are the days where we took months or years to put ourselves back together after a breakup. Gone are the days where we dramatically mourned over our exes. We don’t grieve anymore. Instead, we simply just move on. And we do that with the help of Netflix and “sliding into people’s DM’s”, as the phrase now goes.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Well, that actually sounds like a huge improvement.”

What’s so bad about getting over our exes quicker than we used to in the past?

Heck, it sounds like this generation has actually mastered the art of moving on. On the contrary, I think that we just got better at creating distractions for ourselves — Distractions which technology presents to us.

We’ve gotten good at forgetting, not on our own terms, but on the terms of social media and the internet.

However, there is a silver lining to all of this. Social media and the internet isn’t all just for promoting a “hit it and quit it” mentality.

In my personal favor, it helped with the re-kindling of a relationship that I never thought would come back to life. Of course, I can’t fully attribute social media and the internet to a fate that may have always been destined — Maybe, it just sped up the process.

Either way, I can’t say that technology is all bad in its effects with dating and relationships. It has merely, as I stated before, created a new playing field.