Teens breaking up online

The Pew Internet & American Life project first chronicled teens breaking off relationships via IM back in 2001 (when the US had a mere 17 million Net users aged 12-17, and 17% of them had used IMs to ask someone out, 13% to break up with someone - see my 6/29/01 issue). Now there's advice for teens who've been rejected online (harder, they say, than a real-life rejection) and a rejection service, papernapkin.net, Wired News reports. Trish McDermott, vice president of romance at Match.com, told the Christian Science Monitor last spring that 48% of online daters say they have experienced an email breakup. This might be a good family discussion topic. My kids aren't dating yet, but someday I'll ask them if they've gotten an impersonal, nonverbal rejection and, if so, how they've dealt with that. And we'll probably talk about the ethics of letting someone down without the courtesy of eye contact. It's an interesting new challenge that the Internet has presented both teens and parents.