Facebook wants you to get over your ex

Raise your hand if you’ve ever emitted a bitter snarl after seeing photos of your ex’s seemingly perfect, wonderful, happy, successful life on Facebook while you were innocently scrolling through your newsfeed.

And, er, also raise your hand if you’ve actively stalked an ex on Facebook to purposely see these images (why you like to self-inflict this sort of pain, you are not entirely sure).

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While Mark Zuckerberg et al. have yet to create the kind of artificial intelligence necessary to save you from yourself in the latter scenario, Facebook now is doing its part to keep you from the avoidable horror of the first.

With the new feature, which is still in the test phase, a relationship status change on Facebook made on a mobile device will now launch a set of tools that would allow you to to hide your ex’s posts from your feed, keep your ex’s name from popping up as an automatic suggestion for tagging in a post, and restrict the information an ex is able to see about you on your profile.

In a statement, Facebook product manager Kelly Winters writes that these new tools are “part of our ongoing effort to develop resources for people who may be going though difficult moments in their lives. We hope these tools will help people end relationships on Facebook with greater ease, comfort and sense of control.”

Experts say Facebook might be on to something. it’s known that regular communication after a break-up is not exactly good for mental health, says David Sbarra, PhD, an associate professor and the director of clinical training in the department of psychology at the University of Arizona and an expert on the psychology of break-ups.

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“In my work, we have studied how in-person contact affects adults’ reports to marital separation, and, in an earlier study, how in-person contact affects people after a non-marital break-up,” Sbarra tells “Following marital separation, people who were struggling to accept the breakup reported significantly worse outcomes when they have regular contact with an ex-partner. This finding fit with our earlier study that any contact with an ex-partner was associated with more sadness after a break-up.”

And social media, Sbarra notes, presents a whole new arena for tracking your ex-partner. “My sense is that for people who are struggling with a separation, it’s essentially adding fuel to the fire of your breakup-related suffering to monitor your ex-partner on Facebook,” he says.

That’s why these new tools might really help, though Sbarra says “we won’t know for sure until we get some outcome data.”

Note to psychology students in search of a research topic: Sbarra mentions that it “would be very intriguing if people who are randomly assigned to get access to the tool report changes in their relationship status to being in a new relationship sooner than people who have to cope without the tool.

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The central issue here is what can be measured as a good or bad outcome to know if the tool is working as its intended. Without that kind of data, it’s anyone’s guess as to what might work best when getting over an ex-partner.”

And until then? Well, maybe keep putting social media to use by using Foursquare and Swarm to help ensure that you can avoid unplanned face-to-face encounters.