She deleted everything in about three minutes. Having had a "ceremonial moving-on," she said, she felt empowered.

In predigital times, the end of a relationship might have been marked by the burning of letters. The ex would have been scissored out of photographs, and LP's too painful to hear dropped off in the nearest Goodwill bin. Or maybe everything would have been parked in a shoe-box way station under the bed. But modern life means that mementos of affairs of the heart reside on computers. And they can be expunged with brutal efficiency.

While the Internet has sped up modern dating and made encyclopedic records about love interests more readily available, the magic of digital erasure allows the other end of a relationship, the bust-up, to be just as seamless: the lovelorn can simply delete away the pain.

Was die nicht alles glauben.