Breakup 101: Facebook Stalking Just Makes It Harder

In a relationship our lives revolve around each other, every day. When the relationship ends, it's an abrupt end to knowing and being a part of each other's lives. Eventually, it starts gnawing at you and you are curious to know what is happening in your partner's life. Are they moving on or sulking over you. To get answers, we resort to social media platforms such as Facebook to find out what going on in our exe's lives. In other words, we end up stalking our exe's across social networks! Does it help knowing? Or does it just deepen the wound? A study was conducted on this issue, by Dr Jesse Fox and her colleagues, Ohio State University.

The Daily Mail reports that the findings of the study revealed that Facebook stalking can do more damage than good, as it prolongs the distress without resuming to closure. It apparently can even affect future relationships. The behavior presumably creates a vicious cycle wherein social networks are accessed to help cope with the split up, but ends up making the situation worse prompting us to seek further reassurance. The cycle continues.

The study further revealed that people who were more committed in relationships and who underwent higher levels of emotional distress, resorted more to stalking their exe's on social networks. The official name for Facebook stalking is 'Interpersonal Electronic Surveillance (IES)'. Also, it is usually the person who is dumped who does the stalking rather than the one who broke up, the study revealed.

According to the Daily Mail, the study by Dr Jesse Fox and team, surveyed 150 male and 281 female Facebook users in the 18 to 42 age group, on several factors such as their attachment style, how invested they are in relationships, whether they use social networks to look for 'alternatives', if they'd ever 'stalked' exes on Facebook, and who ended their last relationship.