In the summer of 2005, Dane Clark thought his life was over. The 24-year-old college student from Toronto had just split up with his girlfriend of two years. As so often happens when relationships end badly, he found himself continuously rereading old e-mails, revisiting situations and conversations and seeking answers to what went wrong.
When he failed to find any, Clark did the obvious thing: He turned to Google.
Surprised to find no online forum where he could pour out his heart, Clark and his roommate Karol Orzechowski, who also happened to be struggling with a severe case of post-breakup trauma, decided to fill that void. Dane and Karol became Dwayne and Charles, and together they launched e-closure.com, a blog where the romantically forlorn can vent their heartache and get advice.
“The people on the Internet won’t tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to hear,” Clark said.
For years, people have been using the Internet to find partners. Now, the Internet is moving to the next stage: providing help when things go sour.
The anonymity of the Internet can help disappointed lovers and connect them with others going through the same thing, said John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., who has been researching the psychology of cyberspace for 15 years.
“There might be a level of honesty and disclosure online that you wouldn’t get in-person,” he explained.
Since its launch, e-closure.com has had roughly 400,000 individual visits, Clark said. Two of those came from Steven Kish, a 33-year-old from Detroit, who sent his first breakup letter to e-closure.com two years ago.
“Actually writing it down and making it permanent was pretty cathartic,” said Kish, a devoted fan of e-closure.com. “It was like these problems no longer belonged to me.”
Kathleen Horan, a 38-year-old from New York City, also found solace at e-closure. In 2006, two weeks after she split up with her long-term boyfriend, Horan’s father died, and she flew to California to arrange for his funeral.
“As I was writing his obituary,” Horan recalled, “I had this odd sense that I should be writing another one.”
And that’s precisely what she did. Back in New York, Horan sat down and wrote an obituary for her relationship.
Convinced that others might feel a similar need, Horan launched relation shipobit.com. Since its launch party the night before Valentine’s Day, more than 500 mourning lovers have publicized their grief on the site.
