Reflections on the Breaking Point of Digital Relationships

A paper acceptance, the research process, and my thoughts

Recently, we had a paper accepted to CSCW 2026! Preprint here (I will edit an arXiv link when it becomes available). CSCW stands for Computer-Supported Collaborative Work, and the domain’s namesake is also one of the top conferences for research that explores how humans use technology to interact with each other. In this work, I worked with Angela (my undergrad intern and co-first author on this project) and Robert (my supervisor) to reflect on the role of digital technology at the breaking point of a relationship. Here, I talk a bit about what motivated this project, my thoughts throughout the research, and very briefly what we found.

Introduction

This project actually stems from a very base human experience, something that Angela, I, and I’m sure many potential readers are familiar with - the feeling of needing to “get rid” of someone in your life right now. At the time of starting the study, such experiences were rather fresh in my mind. No matter how close you have been before, or how much you still want a friendship or relationship, there may be a breaking point where you need separation. In the real world, separation is more apparent through ignoring the other person and avoiding them. However, in the digital world - comprising one’s digital footprint, digital connectedness, mutual friends, and the algorithm - removing someone else becomes a lot more complex. Thus, in this study, we investigate digital severance - the actions, feelings, and experiences that both parties experience at moments of relational breakdown. This often takes place through the actions of blocking, unfriending, and so forth.

Reflecting on the Process

To explore people’s feelings and experiences, we decided to take the obvious approach and just ask them directly. This work employs interviews with 30 participants with experience of being severed or severing a relationship with someone else.

Although I have done interviews for other studies before, this was one of the most difficult studies for me to run, because it often involved conversations about moments which, to be blunt, were emotionally awful for my participants. Even though in some cases, some time had passed and people looked upon their breakups or fallouts with humour, I still recognize that these were moments that were difficult to experience - I know that firsthand as well! I deeply thank all my participants for coming and sharing their experiences with me, and it was a pleasure to talk to all of you. It was not only useful for research purposes, but also for understanding my own experiences as well.

This project likely had the most qualitatively rich data I have ever worked with, and we had the largest codebook I had used up until then. Below shows some initial thematic mappings of our codes that ended up informing our findings - we tried to follow a sort-of narrative arc that worked well for us.

What We Found

I will kind of breeze through what we found, because all the full details are in the paper itself (with very detailed quotes!)

But essentially, it starts by acknowledging that even close relationships (friendships, romantic relationships, etc.) can enter a sort of emotional flux. People overstep boundaries, or they have communication differences, or they have grown into fundamentally different values. At some point, someone has to decide - “Do I stay or do I step away?” - weighing their capacity for conflict avoidance, their personal desires, their past history together, etc. At a specific breaking point, this might lead to severance, which can involve actions at different severities, like ghosting, blocking, unfriending, etc.

When we look at the most severe actions (especially blocking, which was most often brought up by our participants), we find that it represents the split motivations of taking back control for yourself and exerting power over the other party. The former paints severance as a way to feel better through personal autonomy, the latter paints severance as a way to feel better through punishing others.

Yet, despite taking such actions to feel better immediately, the loss of a close relationship can entail lasting feelings and complexities for both sides - interleaving the guilt of hurting someone else, the hurt of being excluded, the wistfulness of wanting an apology that will never happen, the ache of wanting to make up, etc. To handle this emotional turmoil, people look both internally and externally to try to find the closure they feel like they never got. The tl;dr of the findings is summarized in the following graphic:

So why is this important? In essence, the digital actions available to people don’t always help them deal with the emotional turmoil involved. Participants came to our study, and still talked about wanting the apology they never got, or not knowing if they did the right thing or not, or felt guilty or hurt over things that happened far in the past. It’s important for me, as a researcher and person, to highlight the stories of emotional turmoil that still exist in the wake of existing solutions, so that we can continue to think about the ways to support people at the end of their relationships.

Concluding Thoughts

Research, to me, is an expression of personal identity. This project helped me understand my own feelings and behaviours in the past, and I hope that the work can help others with the same thing. I recognize that what we suggested for future changes is difficult for social media companies to consider - a lot of blocking / unfriending behaviours is warranted, e.g. for harassment, spam, etc. So what value do they have in detecting and providing support for the most edge cases? Yet, I hope that this work will inform a future where people can end a relationship with dignity and personal respect, even if it comes with sadness, anger, or confusion. And lastly, for people who have been or continue to be in these situations, I believe that your feelings are valid, and I hope you feel a little more seen.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading my first post about my research! Thanks for the participants who shared their experiences, the reviewers who helped me improve the paper, my co-authors for their support throughout, and you, the reader, for reading about my research! I hope to write more to disseminate my research to the public a bit more accessibly. I would highly recommend you read the paper [link] - we tried to fill it with voices, not just theory and citations.