It’s an age-old question. When should you break up?

According to Reddit, approximately half the time.

George Shao, a computer science student at the University of Waterloo, has been data-mining Reddit to understand different trends, including within the “relationship advice” forum (r/relationship_advice).

The forum used to be a treasure trove of romantic counsel. People wrote in about their relationship, uh, asking for advice. Some of the forum’s 2 million weekly visitors responded.

But over time, George noticed a curious phenomenon, he told me in an interview. The prevailing Reddit lore, mirrored on his own feed, was the “subreddit” had gone from offering, you know, advice — to condemning just about every couple who sought it.

“But there’s never been any actual factual definitive evidence,” he said.

So George crunched the numbers, and his (bleak) findings, charted below, quickly went viral.

For every post since 2010, George used AI to filter for (and then categorize) the subreddit’s most “upvoted” (liked) comments. He found that comments advising boundaries, therapy, and breakups have surged — while nearly every other kind of advice (telling people to communicate, give each other space, compromise, etc.) has declined. So, the lore was correct. Telling people to walk away or “cut contact” with someone (shown by that up-and-to-the-right red line) is the most popular tip in the “relationship advice” subreddit, and it’s not even close.

The graph is scary because it tracks closely with today’s emergent relationship orthodoxy, where the guiding “value” is the preservation of autonomy. And when that’s the north star, disciplines like communication and compromise, requiring skills that can encourage personal growth through relationships, are reserved for the rare easy fix — and truly challenging behaviors, like the ones we all display all the time, are going to be grounds for breaking up.

“It’s very much all or nothing,” one commenter, in a thread of folks attempting to make sense of George’s findings, said. “One big cesspool of miserable people seeking company using it as a coping mechanism that serves to validate the reason they’re lonely. They aren’t willing to put up with anything, unwilling to compromise, set unobtainable high standards for partners, and find anything outside of their collective Overton window unacceptable.”

WELCOME TO HELL

Before we project these findings onto the culture writ large (which we will do, lol), it’s best to acknowledge the Reddit of it all.

As George put it: breaking up is “probably not the most common ideal way to deal with a relationship problem, but I guess it is on Reddit.”

Indeed. It’s important to understand that Reddit, and especially this forum, is a pretty dark corner of the internet. The posts tend to depict inflammatory stories with clear heroes and villains, and the commenters, who relish in their detachment, love to draw hard, satisfying lines. Meaning r/relationship_advice is essentially reality television. A place to escape, not solve, your problems — assuming your problems, like most, contain shades of gray.

There was the time a wife posted that her husband saw her “low libido” (she wasn’t into him because he was a douchebag) as a moral failure to honor his “love language” (very enthusiastic sex). The top comment naturally advised breaking up.

Or the time someone got an STD after her boyfriend’s “guy’s trip” (he claimed he was molested by a masseuse). The top comment naturally advised breaking up, and the second-top comment, at 5.8K upvotes, said: “This story reeks as much as that guys’ dick after his sex tourism trip. Jesus.”

What should you do when your boyfriend steals the money you were saving for vet bills? According to the top comment: “Dump him and call the cops.”

If you find half-naked mirror selfies of your wife’s work husband on her phone, and she says the guy was just trying to “show progress” in the gym? “Dude, you are being blind.”

When your boyfriend is trying to anonymously bully you online, or make you lose weight, or get back together after breaking off your engagement to marry, have kids with, and then divorce his now ex-wife? “Time to delete the whole boyfriend” and “Fuck him” and “HARD PASS,” respectively.

Some commenters say this inflammatory dynamic — ridiculous stories invoking a mix of jokes and actual breakup advice — has worsened with the rise of AI-generated, attention-grabbing posts made to “farm engagement.” As one user put it: “Relationship advice is filled with ‘I (F18) have the kindest, most amazing fiance (M46), however he keeps on breaking my wrists when he’s angry and I just found out he’s hiding a collection of women’s ID, what to do?’”

Or take this story from a year ago: when a wife asked her husband, a classically unhelpful man with “a small porn addiction,” for more help around the house. His response: “we should just get a divorce,” she wrote — an attempt (he admitted, lol) to scare her into shutting up. The post is too poorly written to be AI-generated, but the top comment, with 14K upvotes, almost certainly was: “He’s not just manipulating you — he’s exploiting you… You’re not overreacting; you’re finally seeing clearly.”

In a nutshell, is what the people want from r/relationship_advice. A jerk and an easy verdict that a sycophantic word-predictor is happy to provide.

Still, like within any reality show, some relationship stories show the full gamut of more nuanced human foibles (our talent for avoidance, say). And even in those cases, the range of advice stays nice and narrow: breakup, therapy, rinse and repeat.

For instance, earlier this month, a 23-year-old wrote that his girlfriend of two years was struggling with anxiety and depression. And it essentially killed the vibe. He was starting to worry that he was throwing his life away, like he “could be doing other things.”

“I didn’t have a problem with that at first, but one day a thought crossed my mind: ‘It feels more like I’m her father than her boyfriend,’ and that started to eat away at me,” he wrote.

“Am I the problem?”

The top comment, and every comment actually, advised breaking up:

“You can just break up with her. You can help her along the way, but if you’ve just decided to accept this, then this is your life. You don’t need to.”

Who knows if breaking up is the right or wrong call here. This is a 23-year-old, unmarried man, after all. But where does the unanimousness of the breakup verdict stem from? Just the situation? Or perhaps also the cultural aversion to the absolute vibe kill(, man) of someone else’s struggles?

Or take this story from 2023. A couple had been married for seven happy years. They didn’t fight much, they did “little things for each other,” and “I receive flowers no less than 10 times a year,” the wife wrote — until one day, her husband sat her down to have a serious conversation.

He wanted to “open up” the relationship (consensually see other people), calling it a “dealbreaker,” but couldn’t quite explain why, fumbling over his words. She was blindsided and ashamed: “I had never felt so unwanted in my life than in that moment.”

The next day, after coming home from work, he confessed: there were things he wanted to explore in the bedroom. “Things” — kinks he wouldn’t name — that he never got to experience before they got married at just 21 and 22 years old: “they are an escalation of things he already knows I’m not down for but won’t go into specifics,” she wrote.

He wanted them to talk through the open marriage concept in counseling. She refused, for fear he and the therapist would “bully” her into trying “guilt free cheating,” as she saw it. Besides, his request was her dealbreaker:

“He said if we go back into a relationship and pretend this never happened then he would end up cheating on me. For him, it was open marriage or nothing,” she wrote. “I chose nothing.”

A week later, she filed for divorce.

“Advice?” she wrote the subreddit; should she have waited longer?