On September 3, Hannah Van De Peer broke up with her boyfriend of a year and a half. One week later, she announced it on Twitter. “Getting a haircut tomorrow eve to soft launch my break-up, can we all agree to pay attention to me when this happens pls?” the 24-year-old wrote, later adding in a subsequent tweet: “Or was this actually the soft launch… u will never know.”
Soon after, Van De Peer wrote about the break-up in detail, referring to the article as the “hard-launching” of her split. “It felt really natural,” she says. “Through my work, I’ve built a close online community who saw me through my entire relationship with all its ups and downs. Announcing the break-up felt like a convenient way of telling everyone all at once, but it also helped me draw a line under the relationship. Like, this is the start of a new era.”
Of all the quirks that define modern relationships, perhaps the oddest is the fact that we feel compelled to tell strangers on the internet about them. And yet, it’s something we’ve been doing for years. Millennials will recall Facebook’s “relationship status” feature, which was introduced in the early ’00s shortly after the site launched. Users could inform friends of any changes to their love lives within a matter of clicks, with options ranging from “single” and “in a relationship” to the fateful “it’s complicated.”
Fast forward a decade, though, and the feature had been rendered somewhat redundant, a relic of early-’00s tech. In 2015, one online poll found that 40% of 20-somethings refused to share their relationship status on Facebook. But the compulsion to share the news never went away—people just started doing it differently.
In 2020, actor and comedian Rachel Sennott introduced the concept of soft-launching a relationship in a viral tweet. “Congrats on the Instagram soft launch of ur boyfriend (pic on story, elbow and side profile only),” she wrote, adopting terminology traditionally used by businesses when slowly rolling out new products. The act of doing exactly this quickly became habitual among social media users as a way of gently introducing followers to their new partners.
What has started happening now, though, is the opposite. Search “break-up announcement” on TikTok and you’ll find thousands of videos of people sharing the news that they have split from their most recent partner. Some are teary-eyed clips of exes smiling helplessly at the camera. Others are more considered, talking-to-camera explanations. And some feature actual cakes that share the news in icing.
On Instagram, people tend to share the news in more subtle ways, without clear words or hashtags. Like by deleting photographs of their partners, or sharing videos to indicate that they’re moving house or even country. Some may call this a “soft” launch whereas the aforementioned, more explicit, examples are seen as “hard” launches.
“If you’re unsure about your break-up or feel anxious about how to move on, sharing it can be cathartic and encourage you to be ready to start a new chapter,” explains psychologist Jo Hemmings. “It feels a lot less personal than having to explain it in person, where questions may be asked and the hurt might feel more acute.”
For Van De Peer, who has over 4,000 followers on Twitter, the stakes of a break-up announcement are arguably lower than those of someone with a more significant following. For the latter, it’s a different matter altogether. Celebrities have traditionally announced break-ups with official statements released on their behalf by press representatives—remember Gwyneth and Chris’s “conscious uncoupling”?
But in recent years, social media influencers have started doing the same. Consider Niomi Smart (1.3 million followers on Instagram), who has shared numerous break-ups with her followers. “At the beginning of my previous relationship I was conscious of not sharing our private lives,” she says. “But of course as the years go on and things become increasingly serious, I relaxed and became comfortable sharing exciting snippets of our lives together, including a move to India shortly after our engagement in 2020.”
When Smart and her ex split, she took a break from social media. “Initially, I didn’t feel comfortable or ready to share what was going on,” she recalls. “But the bombardment of messages demanding I explain what was going on was a sad and anxious thing to navigate, when all I really had the capacity for was dealing with the break-up itself.” Smart eventually decided to address it in a video she posted on YouTube titled “Emotional Healing: My Experience and Advice.”
“It was the only thing I could do to move on online,” she explains. “In my video, I chose to focus on the feelings of heartbreak and the steps I was taking to heal, rather than speaking of the details.” By approaching it this way, Smart was able to put an end to speculation and turn her break-up into a positive learning experience for her followers. To date, the video has more than 366,000 views, with thousands of comments from viewers thanking Smart and identifying with her.
“Many of my followers have grown up with me and feel more like family. As much as I struggled with the pressure to announce the end of my relationship, it would’ve felt dishonest refusing to acknowledge it and continue on as if nothing had happened. And I have to admit, I needed them too during this tough time.”
The experience was similar for content creator Katie Snooks, who announced her split from her fiancé one month after it happened. “He was very prominent in my YouTube videos and Instagram posts when we were together,” she recalls. “Once our relationship broke down and he suddenly disappeared from my content, I was visibly very low in the videos I was putting out. So I filmed a ‘we broke up’ video for my YouTube channel.” Wanting to be honest with her followers was one motivator, as was closure. “Selfishly, I just didn’t want to have to talk about it again,” she explains.
Social media influencer or not, as more of us share our lives with people online, perhaps it’s only natural that we’d post about a break-up, much like we might a promotion or a lifestyle change. “It could be seen as an aspect of the ‘announcement culture’ we see operating on social media,” says clinical psychologist Marc Hekster. “While it may not generate likes, it may generate attention or even sympathy.”
The one catch in all this, though, is where everyone’s exes come into it. What’s the etiquette of posting about your break-up online? Do you need to ask your ex’s permission? And what if they react negatively to the announcement? “I called him the night before I posted it, and asked if it was okay,” says Van De Peer. “We laughed about it, and he said it was absolutely fine.” Snooks did the same. “He didn’t want to watch the video but I got the impression he was happy I was announcing it as it meant he could start dating without people thinking he was still in a relationship with me,” she explains.
For Smart, her ex simply wasn’t part of the equation. “We all go through tough times, low moments, and have our hearts broken,” she says. “I don’t think there’s any shame in sharing that journey online if it can help others going through something similar. As hesitant as I was to post the update, I am so pleased I did because it has brought more depth and value to my content, and consequently brought me closer to my followers.”