A new study from the Pew Research Center shows that Americans are getting a lot more comfortable forging new relationships online. They’re also becoming quite adept at virtually ending them: Among Americans with recent dating experience, 17 percent have “broken up with someone they were dating by text message, email, or by sending a message online.” Among daters under 30, 22 percent have leveraged the Internet to end a relationship. And women are slightly more likely to shoot off a breakup email than men are—18 percent of them have done it, compared to 15 percent of men.
And yet, in Internet breakups aired publicly on the Internet, the typical sender is male. In a recent xoJane It Happened to Me, Aly Walansky worked through feelings of shock and despair after an on-again off-again boyfriend “dumped me via email after ten years together.” Nikki Metzgar mined similar territory in a How About We essay published last year. Jezebel’s Crap Email From a Dude series has highlighted the most offensive examples of the form for years. And before we texted our discontents, Carrie Bradshaw got dumped via a two-sentence Post-It note: “I’m sorry, I can’t. Don’t hate me.”
As the new Pew numbers show, the breakup email is not a dude thing—it’s a human one. Women, after all, pioneered the Dear John genre. Both Britney Spears and Russell Brand have initiated divorces via text message