Dissolving a Digital Relationship: A Critical Examination of Digital Severance Behaviours in Close Relationships

2026-01-07

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates how “digital disconnection”—the practices enacted when intimate relationships end in digital environments—reshapes the psychological experiences and power dynamics between former partners. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 30 individuals who have personally navigated such breakups, and employing a critical hermeneutic framework alongside thematic analysis, the research offers the first systematic theorization of digital disconnection through the intersecting lenses of power, control, and ambiguous loss. The analysis identifies three core tensions—visibility versus disappearance, control versus loss of control, and connection versus rupture—as well as four key open questions. These findings provide a novel theoretical pathway for understanding the emotional complexity of relationship dissolution in the digital age and lay foundational insights for future design of digital relational technologies and mental health interventions.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Social media analysis through the lenses of networks
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content

Abstract

Fulfilling social connections are crucial for human well-being and belonging, but not all relationships last forever. As interactions increasingly move online, the act of digitally severing a relationship - e.g. through blocking or unfriending - has become progressively more common as well. This study considers actions of"digital severance"through interviews with 30 participants with experience as the initiator and/or recipient of such situations. Through a critical interpretative lens, we explore how people perceive and interpret their severance experience and how the online setting of social media shapes these dynamics. We develop themes that position digital severance as being intertwined with power and control, and we highlight (im)balances between an individual's desires that can lead to feelings of disempowerment and ambiguous loss for both parties. We discuss the implications of our research, outlining three key tensions and four open questions regarding digital relationships, meaning-making, and design outcomes for future exploration.

Problem

• digital severance
• close relationships
• social media
• ambiguous loss
• power dynamics

Innovation

• digital severance
• critical interpretative analysis
• power and control
• ambiguous loss
• social media relationships