Those of us who are still active in the dating game but have memories of trying to find a partner in the old (analogue) way have had to contend with not only a shift of vocabulary but a whole new way of meeting people. I suppose things have always evolved: 100 years ago you pretty much had to marry whoever your parents chose for you without even road testing them first, and then either buy one of those ivory dildos they had back then if you were a girl or just sleep with loads of prostitutes if you were a boy in the very likely event that things didn’t work out.
With the advent of free love and the pill, things got a little simpler but at the same time a potential partner you were still pretty much limited to your friends of friends or whoever you could pick up in a sweaty nightclub.
I’m not intending to go over the mores of Internet dating, everyone knows that, and the only thing I’ll say on the subject is that the fewer frustrated people there are because they aren’t getting any, the better overall society is. There is a clear correlation between men and women getting together and the decrease in violence we have seen in all western societies over the last 40 years. In places where there are still a lot of tabus around sex, things are very different; and yes, I do mean the Middle East.
Anyway what piqued my interest recently is the growing vocabulary of breaking up in the age of social media, and if we think about it, we are all probably guilty of it, whether you admit it or not. The first word is ghosting, which is a kind of breakup where you don’t actually break up, you just stop replying to attempts to contact you even if they start posting increasingly desperate please for attention on your Instagram page. The opposite of ghosting is haunting, where someone you are trying to break up with keeps tabs on you and you just can’t shake them off. In this scenario you have to become a real privacy setting ninja so they stop stalking you. The final one is breadcrumbing, which is when you lead someone on with just enough attention so that they keep hanging around, faintly losing hope until the next flirty message or picture.
So back to the title of the post: it doesn’t matter if you are in the age of matchmaking, free love, tinder or virtual sex (give it a couple of years and we will all be doing it online). There is only one way to break up with style, the Armani/Brioni/Dior of breaking up instead of the fast fashion Next/H&M/Zara and that is to either call the person or preferably meet them for a coffee, and tell them face to face. “I’m sorry I don’t love you any more”. And after that, make it clean and don’t string them along.
Trust me, if everyone did that, the world would be a better place.
