Electronic Courage

Over the course of a lifetime, most people will be in one or more dating relationships that they have to call off before finding the love of their life and settling down (assuming that they want to settle down in the first place). In situations where you’ve only dated the person a few times, you can usually break things off without a great amount of drama, just by saying that this isn’t working for you, but in the case of highly dramatic (or clinging) personalities, you may have had to take more drastic measures. If you’re a guy, this might entail just not calling anymore, having your new significant other (assuming you have one) “accidentally” answer a call from your (hopefully now) ex, or in extreme cases by changing your phone number and/or skipping town. If you’re female, this might entail being unaccountably “busy” every night until your (hopefully now) ex stops calling, having your father, brother, best friend or new significant other (assuming you have one) tell your ex to stop calling, or in extreme cases by changing your phone number and/or skipping town. As cowardly as these actions might be, they will at least keep you from having to have the breakup conversation in person…

For people who can’t even handle these time-honored classics, there’s a new service available online that eliminates the need for any involvement in the breakup process, and has the added value of possibly making someone’s pain available for public mockery. According to this article on Canada’s Globe and Mail website, this service (called IDUMP4U.com) will provide a telephone call notification of your termination of the relationship, and then post the audio file of the call on You Tube. Interviewed for the story, the entrepreneur behind this service claims to be providing a useful public service, and making a difference in people’s lives. In the strictest sense, this might be true: he is helping people who are too cowardly to handle their own break-ups escape from unhappy relationships, as well as giving his clients’ exes the chance to get on with their lives and possibly find actual happiness. But in a very real sense, all he is doing is enabling people to be lazy cowards and escape the consequences of their actions…

I haven’t framed this post as an ethics question because, personally, I don’t see that the service described does anything that asking any other third party to help you end a relationship does – and I can’t see how this is any worse than dumping someone by email or text message (which constitutes a legal divorce in certain Islamic countries). If I got a call from an such a service back when I was single, I would probably have concluded that someone who is chicken enough to hire a total stranger to tell me she’s breaking up with me is not someone I really want to be dating in the first place. It’s the logical extension of the saying about “If you loan someone $20 and never see them again (e.g. so they don’t have to pay you back), it was money well spent.” I’m really much more concerned about the potential such a service has for abuse…

Suppose a jealous ex-boyfriend hired such a service to tell you your current significant other is breaking up with you, in order to get you back. Or a spiteful ex-girlfriend started doing this with every new person you go out with, just so you can never be sure if you’ve got a relationship or not. You might be able to get a restraining order, but you’d never really be sure, would you? How about using such a service to make an enemy think someone is stalking them, by having people they’ve never even met “dump” them over the telephone (and on You Tube)? I don’t doubt that the entrepreneur in our story will do his best to weed out fraudulent and abusive uses of his service, but this has the potential to go south on him very quickly, resulting in actual lawsuits, loss of credibility, and lots of real-world hard feelings…

Seems like a difficult way to make a living, is all I’m saying. But for the moment, there’s someone selling electronic courage online for those who don’t have any of their own…