Late last month, 200 teenagers from Boston-area schools gathered to discuss the minutia of Facebook breakup etiquette.  Should you delete pictures of your ex after splitting up?  Is it O.K. to unfriend your last girlfriend if you can’t stop looking at her profile?  And is it ever ethically defensible to change your relationship status to single without first notifying the person whose heart you’re crushing? 

These pressing adolescent questions were part of a one-day conference on “healthy breakups” sponsored by the Boston Public Health Commission. “ No one talks to young people about this aspect of relationships,” Nicole Daley, one of the conference organizers, told me between breakout sessions as teenagers swarmed a nearby cotton-candy stand. “ We’re here to change that.” 

Minutes later, 15 high-school students on a sugar high convened for a session on “creating online boundaries.”  The girls outnumbered the boys, and they didn’t hesitate to gang up on a charming — and, until then, immensely well liked — 17-year-old named Roberto, who proclaimed with a bit too much gusto that “racing to update your relationship status after a breakup” is a healthy behavior.  That was just one of a handful of scenarios the teenagers debated and placed into “healthy” or “unhealthy” categories: others included “posting mean/embarrassing statuses about your ex” (unhealthy) and “rushing into a new ‘Facebook official’ relationship” (understandable, but still not healthy). 

“Roberto, you’re really going to run all the way to your house after school to change your status?”  a 16-year-old named Lazangie asked, shaking her head.  She knows a thing or two about Facebook-related breakups: her last relationship ended, she said, because her ex-boyfriend couldn’t handle her male friends posting niceties on her wall.