Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (But Posting the Letters May Make It Easier)

When a couple breaks up, usually at least one of them is looking for closure. Would posting your e-mail correspondence with your ex online help you?

By Anna David

There are all sorts of ways to break up. But whether you both tenderly express your innermost feelings and agree to try to remain friends or you hang up on him after telling him to drop dead, chances are that at least part of the dissolution took place over e-mail. Because, as Dwayne of the Toronto-based Website e-closure.com says, "E-mail is just so easy to send."

Dwayne knows of what he speaks. As one-half of the editorial team behind e-closure.com, he's responsible for posting some of the most earnest and embittered break-up e-mails out there. (Dwayne isn't his real name, and the photo of he and his site partner in the "About Me" section of e-closure.com has their eyes blocked out; breaking up is a messy business and these two guys don't need any trouble.)

The site, which Dwayne started with his former roommate when they were each going through break-ups with their respective girlfriends and "essentially just drinking and crying on each other's shoulders," was initially launched to fill a void. "When I was going on the Internet, trying to find people I could relate to and trying to see how the e-mails my ex and I were sending compared to everyone else's out there, I couldn't find anything," Dwayne recalls.

They started by posting their own break-up missives and slowly, letters from strangers containing break-up e-mails, along with detailed explanations of what had gone on in the various relationships, began to filter in.

While Dwayne believes that what they do is beneficial--"I think it's sort of cathartic because it helps you let a relationship go if you get other people's feedback on it"--not all of those who have been featured on the site see it that way. "We once got a very threatening letter where this guy demanded we take his ex-girlfriend's letters down," Dwayne remembers. "We did, but we posted his letter to us instead."

Still, not all of the relationships they chronicle had entirely antagonistic endings. "My favorite is this one between two girls," Dwayne says. "It was just very sweet and mature and included a Post-it note one of them had written about how they'd meet up in 2012 in a certain place no matter what ended up happening between them."

While Dwayne concedes that most of the break-up letters are on the harsh side (he estimates that only between 10 to 15 percent of them qualify as tender), there are plenty that haven't and won't ever be posted because they're simply "too hateful."

One thing is certain: Because of the uncertain nature of love, fresh break-up letters are being written all the time. Dwayne, as a matter of fact, is in the process of going through a split right now himself. "But it will be some time," he says, almost apologetically, "before the closure letters start."