Breaking Up? There’s an App for That

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COMMENTARY

I'd like to help you in your struggle
To be free
There must be fifty ways
To leave your lover

When he wrote these words back in 1975, Paul Simon was talking about dropping off the key and getting yourself free.

To his list of 50 ways, breakup apps can now be added.

Breaking up isn’t that hard to do.

You can simply download any number of apps that will do the heavy emotional lifting for you. For a small fee, you can let somebody else do the breaking up for you. No sweat.

The New York Times reports that there’s a flourishing breakup industrial complex out there.

Take the “Breakup Shop,” for example. It’s the brainchild of MacKenzie Keast, recently interviewed on NPR. Keast saw that the digital dating road was littered with the lovelorn, and that in the age of electronic romance, online jilting was inevitable. So he and his kid brother came up with a “pain-free, easy way” to get the breaking up deed done.

The Breakup Shop’s home page announces that it believes everyone deserves to be single. It offers to “Let us handle the messy work of the breakup so you can spend more time swiping right.” The site notes that all of itsproducts“are designed to give you peace of mind when ending your relationship, minimizing discomfort and maximizing potential for long-term friendship.”

For just $10, the Breakup Shop will send your sweetheart a text that you are breaking up with her/him. For $20, they’ll send a standard breakup letter. They do offer deepest sympathies. Breakup text and bouquet? $48. The “kindly” messages are sent by “Heartbreakers.”(You can apply for the job of Heartbreaker while you are on the site. The job involves performing “breakups through texts, emails, letters, or phone calls on behalf of customers to their future exes.” There’s an upside to the job-you “get to be your own boss, earn a great income-and change people’s lives.”)

Fortunately, you can also download apps for emotional comfort if you are dumbstruck after you’ve been hit by one of these e-grenades. There’s the Breakup app, for instance, which bills itself as “your best friend during heartbreak.” This app delivers “the best breakup music, advice, and stories that make getting over a relationship easier.” You can hang out with them online so your broken heart will heal faster.

The list of apps to help you get over a breakup or lingering obsession doesn’t end there. There’s Rx Breakup, now available on iTunes. You can purchase a 30-day 3-step program that has been described as boot camp for the brokenhearted. And there’s also Mend, a new site that offers “millennial-friendly breakup content.” Mend helps you “kickstart your mending with our 10 day Heartbreak Cleanse.” You can select from a range of options, from the $49 “cope cleanse” to the $299 “Thrive Cleanse.”

And-because social media makes it hard to make a clean break with your ex- there are apps that make it easy to expunge all traces of your former boyfriend or girlfriend from your social media accounts. Killswitch, for example, promises to make breakups “suck less.” Blockyourex boasts that is “now blocking over 22,103 exes from the internet!”

Breakups hurt. Even the traditional methods are painful. But an adios via a third party? How cold is that?

Adele sums up breakups in her new hit song “All I ask”…

It matters how this ends
Cause what if I never love again?