Heartache, Ghosting, and Going Viral: The Rise of Online Breakup Content

Words: Laura-Ashley Modunkwu

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Regardless of whether you’re still dutifully swiping on one of the many apps promising romantic happiness, or you’ve sworn off dating entirely, it’s nearly impossible to avoid any and all talks of l-o-v-e: algorithms have made sure of it. According to Pew Research, over 80% of social media users report seeing relationship content on their feeds, and there are now over 13 million TikTok posts tagged #dating, #breakup, or #cheating. We’ve all been forced to bear witness to what’s become the digital love cycle: a turbulent journey that takes us from meet-cutes (or matches) and anniversaries to, inevitably, the crash and burn.

It’s that final act, heartbreak, that’s become the internet’s latest spectacle. Recently, some breakups seem engineered specifically for virality: intense emotion, endless receipts, and the irresistible urge for strangers to weigh in.

Take Bella*, a 24-year-old from Seattle, who posted on TikTok about her recent breakup. She ended things with her boyfriend over text on his birthday (a decision she admits might sound cruel, but insists was necessary). Through some sleuthing, she’d discovered that her boyfriend of seven months had broken a rule of the relationship by re-following previous partners on Instagram. Normally, she’d rant to her friends about this kind of behaviour, but instead she filmed a TikTok in an attempt to reach an impartial audience to weigh in. “I think it was just me venting,” she says, “like a diary, but with the hope someone out there would get it.”

Her video racked up nearly 55,000 views – not viral by TikTok metrics nowadays, but enough to garner hundreds of comments ranging from sympathy, approval, to chauvinism, all in equal measure. For Bella, the validation came fast, but so did the fatigue. “I love making videos and getting to talk to the camera,” she explains, “but I don’t like to centre my life around dating or men.” 

For a few days, Bella found herself welcomed into the fold of an unspoken sisterhood, that of what can be dubbed as ‘breakup influencers’. These are women documenting the messy aftermath of rejection, betrayal, heartbreak or just the general malaise of being a single woman today, all the while quickly becoming micro-celebrities in the process. Their stories often begin as simple confessionals about dates gone wrong or relationships unravelling, but once they’re uploaded, the audience takes over: comments flood in, followers multiply, and opinions pile up on what they should do next. 

This logic isn’t new.

In Trick Mirror, writer Jia Tolentino writes about the early-2010s “personal essay industrial complex”; a time when young women were rewarded for packaging their most intimate experiences into essay fodder. “We were writing ourselves into existence,” Tolentino notes. The confessional itself is currency. The heartbreak video genre is a continuation of that lineage with a rawer edge.

We can use philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s term “auto-exploitation” taken from his book The Burnout Society to better understand what’s happening here. He explains that under capitalism, we internalise the urge to produce, brand, and sell even our most private experiences. “Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself,” Han writes.

It’s hard not to see the resonance. Online, even our suffering becomes prime entertainment as it’s no longer about how we feel, but how we can be consumed.

While these women come from all backgrounds, they are overwhelmingly heterosexual and Gen-Z. Bella herself admits she might not have posted her video had she not seen countless others do the same before her. She, like many others, had probably viewed, liked, or shared countless videos of women detailing their male partners ghosting them mid–girls’ trip, draining shared savings to fund affairs, or perhaps ignoring them in disapproval of their hair styling choices, all to the audio of crooning female pop star in the background. Together, these stories reveal more than individual misfortune; they point to a quiet collapse in how straight relationships are negotiated online. This wider gender breakdown has left women documenting, dissecting, and eventually monetising their disillusionment.

Part of what drives this impulse is socialisation. From girlhood, women are taught to distrust and second-guess their own discernment, leading many to crowdsource decisions or feel apologetic for having particular needs. Heartbreak only magnifies that conditioning. When relationships end, the first instinct isn’t always to process privately, but to find a wisp of confirmation you’re blameless, making the comment section a sure-fire way to access a rapt and willing audience. The kind to reassure you that your pain is real and your decision making always sound.

Feminist philosopher Ellie Anderson calls this constant self-questioning a form of “hermeneutic labour”, the emotional and interpretive work women do to make sense of both their own feelings and their partners’ behaviour. Anderson argues that the exploitation of women’s hermeneutic labour is a pervasive feature of what Sandra Bartky describes as the “micropolitics” of intimate relationships. Women are expected to be the relationship maintenance experts, to anticipate emotional needs, decode silence, and soothe tension, while men are allowed to withdraw. This dynamic, Anderson notes, is so normalised that it often appears natural or even desirable, despite leading to women’s dissatisfaction. Following philosopher Kate Manne, Bartky frames this as a kind of structural misogyny: not about individual hatred of women, but about environments that extract women’s emotional and interpretive energy as a given.

Heartbreak content, therefore, becomes another site where women’s hermeneutic labour is mined, this time not by men, but by algorithms and spectators hungry for meaning. The emotional economy of heartbreak content is seductive precisely because it mimics that same dynamic that plays out at scale through the relentless interpretation, except now the audience has replaced the male partner. When traditional structures, partners, workplaces, institutions, fail to deliver closure, the internet promises catharsis, which can be retribution enough. 

Still, the relief rarely lasts. Once the algorithm swiftly moves on, what remains is a kind of vulnerability hangover, the eerie feeling of having exposed everything and still not having been seen.. This is what makes heartbreak content both empowering and depleting. It gives language to a form of suffering that’s easy to dismiss, yet it also commodifies that pain. To heal publicly is to welcome becoming spectacle as the duets, stitches, and think pieces become another kind of haunting. Those behind the screen can create a simulation of care, at best, but at worst, it’s voyeurism, revealing the impossible double bind of womanhood online. 

Still, it’s too easy to dismiss these women as simply self-exploitative or jilted. This chorus of women narrating their breakups may be both symptom and rebellion. And maybe that’s the truest contradiction: that in trying to survive heartbreak, women have turned their pain into work and their work into a way of being seen.