You thought you found your one true love online, but now you’ve been dumped by text or defriended on Facebook without a peep of explanation. Hours of bad TV in your bathrobe haven’t helped. Your friends are tired of your whining.
Forget a pampering makeover to help heal your broken heart this Valentine’s Day. Go for a “digital breakover” instead, using a growing number of tech tools to save you from yourself or to sob on a safe shoulder in the ether.
Online dating sites and apps for hooking up on the go are abundant. Only one of the Apple app store’s recent top 12 downloads for the iPhone was about something other than romantic love, but breakup tech hasn’t kept pace.
Melissa McGlone, 46, in Alexandria, Virginia, turned to The Ex-App after a three-year relationship ended recently with an unceremonious text. After a weak moment or three of electronically stalking her dumper, she used the text, call and e-mail blocker to hold his digits at bay until she could resist temptation on her own.
“I no longer humiliate myself by trying to contact him,” McGlone said.
The free app took off in March last year with about 3,000 downloads in the first nine months. Unlike other blocking tools, The Ex-App also tracks the number of consecutive days spent NOT trying to ferret out a former love.
In New York, 28-year-old Amanda Green relied on the well-established Dear Old Love Tumblr blog after she was dumped on Independence Day 2009 one year into a relationship. The site for the lovelorn describes itself as an anonymous safe haven for “short notes to people we’ve loved (or at least liked). Requited or unrequited.” A selection of notes from the site was later turned into a book.
“It’s a refuge for those of us who know our friends are getting tired of listening to us or those of us who don’t have a confidante at all,” said Green, who posted there regularly for a few months. “It’s also a reminder of how universal these feelings are.”
For Green, it was a place to let go. Hard.
“When I went to your apartment to get my things, I dipped your toothbrush in the toilet. I wasn’t gonna kiss you ever again anyway,” she poured out in one of the messages she left there.
“It’s a, perhaps unfortunately, true story,” Green said, “but I’m in a much better place now. I think I deal with this stuff better now. I’d like to think Dear Old Love has something to do with that.”
There’s also CheaterVille.com, a site full of alleged cheaters complete with mugshot-like photos and sometimes lengthy explanations of love deceptions. While the culprits are identified by name and town, the posters are anonymous.
And NeverLikedItAnyway.com, where dumpees sell off their engagement rings, wedding gowns and other gifts from exes. A recent bargain of the week featured an anonymous teacher’s lynx fur jacket with a real-world price of US$12,000, but a breakup asking price of $7,995. Transactions are private via direct message through the site.
The latest entrant is WotWentWrong, brand new for dumpees in search of feedback from their formers after a first date failed to produce a follow-up call or budding love died on the vine without explanation.
Registered users fill out detailed questionnaires covering what information they’re after (was it my hair, the way I dressed?) and can customize a template letter to be sent through the site to an ex. The ex can respond with as much detail as he or she desires through the site, without contacting the sender directly.
“Many new relationships end without an actual ending, be it in person or via technology,” said the site owner, Audrey Melnik, who came up with the idea after a first date she thought went well vanished without a word.
“There are times when you can be left wondering why things ended if you didn’t ask at the moment that you broke up. We provide a way to give closure,” she said.
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
DIVERSIFY: While Japan already has plentiful access to LNG, a pipeline from Alaska would help it move away from riskier sources such as Russia and the Middle East Japan is considering offering support for a US$44 billion gas pipeline in Alaska as it seeks to court US President Donald Trump and forestall potential trade friction, three officials familiar with the matter said. Officials in Tokyo said Trump might raise the project, which he has said is key for US prosperity and security, when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for the first time in Washington as soon as next week, the sources said. Japan has doubts about the viability of the proposed 1,287km pipeline — intended to link fields in Alaska’s north to a port in the south, where