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from guest blogger julie spira: how my breakup opened a new digital door

I got dumped in an email by my fiancé several years ago. It hurt and it was wrong. He’s now married to someone else but will always go down in history as the guy who didn’t have the courage to end a relationship in person. I shared my not-so-private breakup in the Jan/Feb issue of Psychology Today.  My hope is that someone who reads this post or the article itself will think twice before pushing the send button when it’s time to call it quits. Here’s an excerpt from Elizabeth Svoboda’s article:

Fourteen months into (her) engagement, Spira received an email from her fiancé titled, simply, “Please Read This.” She put the message aside to savor after work and other commitments. When she finally clicked on it, she wished she hadn’t. “The email had an attached document. It said I was not the woman for him, that the relationship was over, and to please send back the ring. It said my belongings would be delivered tomorrow,” Spira says. “I sat there and my whole body started to shake.”

Spira had to plaster on a happy face for a few days—her parents were renewing their marriage vows at a family party on the other side of the country and she wasn’t yet ready to tell anyone about the broken engagement. “I wore my ring. I pretended my fiancé had an emergency and couldn’t make it. Then I went to my room and sobbed in secret.” Once home, she cried every day for a month. Then another electronic communiqué arrived from The Doctor. It said, in its entirety,

“Are you OK?”

That was all she ever heard from him.

The breakup left her socially paralyzed. She didn’t, couldn’t, date, even after many months. She remains single today, three years later. Disappointment ignites anger when she thinks about what happened. “It was cowardly and cruel. Where’s the human side of it? Where’s the respect from someone who was devoted to you for two years?” It’s scant comfort when people tell her that Berger dumped Carrie by Post-it note on Sex and the City. “With email, you don’t even have a guarantee that the person got your message.”

So how did I get over being a jilted fiancé? I can tell you that it wasn’t overnight. I spent two solid months crying every day. I felt lost and confused by it all. I never had a conversation with him to talk about it. It just ended.

As I thought deeply about my engagement ending in an email, I started to write down my thoughts. I was a very early adopter of the Internet and had a digital career going back over 25 years. I decided my fiancé broke the rules of netiquette and it was time to put some rules on the table. My creativity suddenly started to flow. With the encouragement of my girlfriends, the next thing I knew, I was writing my first book.

I knew there were millions of singles visiting online dating sites, and many had been on awful dates. I had been informally writing my friends’ dating profiles for years and coaching them with their relationship dilemmas. It was time to reinvent myself, combining my passion for technology and my desire to love and be loved in one package. I formally created CyberDatingExpert.com as a site for singles and couples to share their online dating stories, and the book was released on Valentine’s Day in 2009.  And that’s how I turned lemons into digital lemonade.

Julie Spira is a worldwide expert in online dating. Her advice has reached millions. You can follow her on Twitter @JulieSpira & like her at Facebook.com/CyberDatingExpert.