Don’t ask me why. But as I sat on my bedroom floor, ears ringing with the echoes of my now-ex-boyfriend’s wobbly voice telling me he wanted to break things off, I lowered my phone and, after promptly purging it of all evidence of my defunct relationship, opened TikTok.
This was a bad call.
Immediately the For You Page, blissfully unaware of what had just happened, served me with a video of two adorable gays filming an adorable skit for their adorable couples page. Clearly, despite its perceived omniscience, TikTok’s algorithm had not been listening in on my calls, nor had it been reading my texts.
When I next braved the app three weeks later, nothing had changed. There they were, taunting me again: boyfriend memes, couples’ skits, soppy compilations of Ian and Mickey from Shameless. The FYP had been there for me in the darkest depths of the pandemic, but now it had forsaken me; left adrift and single in the depressing sea of #relationship TikTok. Well, I thought, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions? Up until a few weeks prior I’d been in a (seemingly) happy relationship, so videos that spoke to that experience were exactly the sort of stuff I’d eagerly engaged with. TikTok was only doing its job, but for obvious reasons I desperately wanted out of this nightmarish pit of romantic content.
I could deal with losing the boyfriend, but I wasn’t about to let TikTok go without a fight.
I began to wonder how long it would take the algorithm to suss out what had happened on the other side of the screen (tl;dr boyfriend: gone, heart: broken) and punt me back to #SingleTok where I belonged. So I set up a simple experiment: Every day I would go on TikTok and scroll the FYP for around 30 minutes, ignoring relationship-themed content and double-tapping anything to do with breakups or being single. Along the way I’d test out a few other tactics to nudge the app in the right direction. With a little luck, I’d be able to return my feed to a point where I wouldn’t want to hurl my phone across the room. I could deal with losing the boyfriend, but I wasn’t about to let TikTok go without a fight.
Day One
My first proper reunion with the For You Page was rough. During the 30 minutes I spent scrolling, I came across a nauseating 19 videos about relationships — including at least three couples’ accounts. Only one (a somber Brokeback Mountain clip) seemed to capture anything resembling my current mood. As I waded through the thick sludge of content I noted down details of offending videos for later reference — we’re talking five skits with captions containing the phrase “when your boyfriend,” three couples bragging about their sex lives, and not one but two Mickey and Ian slideshows. As a result of my thorough note-taking I was perhaps guilty of letting those TikToks play all the way through, and the app possibly misread the watch time as a massive thumbs-up, curating even more scenes of romantic idyll I didn’t want. Needless to say I came away from the experience feeling emotionally drained, but unsurprised. This was not going to happen overnight.
Day Two
For my second dive into the murky waters of the FYP, I needed a change of tack, so I resolved to mark a note on a piece of paper whenever any #relationship videos flashed up, and to swipe past them without hesitation. Once again I spent half an hour scrolling and once again I was made to feel worse for it. I’m unsure how many clips I got through in total, but 42 of them literally had the word ‘boyfriend’ in the goddamn caption. I fell back on the sofa, groaning. Try as I might to steer the algorithm towards memes about being led on and away from skits about spooning, TikTok wasn’t hearing me.
I took my frustrations to the top of Mount Olympus (the TikTok press office) to demand answers from the gods themselves. When I did, a spokesperson directed me to a page on TikTok’s website, which offered me generic reassurance that each person’s feed is unique to them and that this was “part of the magic of TikTok.” I peered back at my FYP just in time to see two identikit twinks tenderly shaving each others’ faces. Not to disagree with Zeus but “magic” was not exactly how I would have described the experience.
In order to see less of what you’re not interested in, TikTok recommends long-pressing on videos and simply hitting the “not interested” button to remould your FYP. I briefly considered this approach but worried that by smacking the algorithm whenever it misbehaved I might end up getting bounced to some weird random corner of the app, like sheep-shearing TikTok. I decided this tactic would be cheating, but still resolved to take a more proactive approach the next day.
Inside the strange, satisfying world of sheep-shearing TikTok
Day Three
Rather than trust the algorithm, I decided to take matters into my own hands and actively look for content more befitting the state of my love life, or lack thereof. As I ventured for the first time into the Explore section of the app, I clocked my suggested searches: “boyfriend gift ideas,” “cuddles with boyfriend,” “boyfriend appreciation.” For fuck’s sake. I had never searched for any of these things in my life yet TikTok was basically calling me a simp to my face. I ignored the slander and instead used the manual search option to find and furiously engage with every video I could under hashtags like #breakup, #heartbreak, and #dumped.
As it turned out, I was late to the party: breakup TikTok is actually one of the app’s most active subcultures (the #breakup hashtag alone has over 9 billion views). It was here I found weepy, snivvily solace among dozens of Gen Z-ers documenting their breakups day-by-day by filming themselves crying, mulling over their lost partners, or doling out sobering advice.
Was this self care or self-destructive? I wondered. To answer that, I reached out to Gillian Myhill, a sex and relationship expert who once ran her own tech company. We agreed algorithms can be cruel things and she assured me it wasn’t unnatural to be annoyed by the couples polluting my FYP, rather, “you’re more in tune to it” when you’ve been through a breakup. “You have a different tint on your vision,” she said.
So was delving into #breakup TikTok a healthy coping mechanism, then? “I think as humans we find solace or understanding to know we’re not the only ones, to know we’re not alone — there are other people going through similar things,” Gillian explained. “There’s a sort of camaraderie you can find through this. Sometimes when you’re sad you need to be around people who understand the pain or who are going through it. It’s a part of the recovery process where you go away and lick your wounds — and a way you can reflect on the relationship is to talk to other humans about your pain and your experiences.”
Day Four
My foray into the miserable world of breakup content seemed to have worked. Half an hour on the FYP only brought me 24 videos from people in apparently devoted relationships. Perhaps spurred on by the re-release of Taylor Swift’s devastating breakup album Red, 12 videos about the now painfully relatable “All Too Well” jumped up at me. In some of them, women joked about breaking up with their boyfriends for the sole purpose of fully immersing themselves in the song’s much anticipated 10-minute version (I mean…be careful what you wish for). Maybe TikTok was just reflecting the cultural moment as it should, or maybe it was finally reading the room. To keep the momentum going, I doubled back through my liked videos and forwarded all the sad ones onto my friends for good measure. In Taylor’s words, this was exhausting.
Why the world of Taylor Swift on TikTok is pretty special
I wasn’t the first person to have this problem. Lydia Venn, 24, a fellow TikTok user who went through a breakup earlier this year, shared my pain. “From what I remember it definitely felt like the algorithm was geared to videos I’d watched whilst in a relationship,” she recalled. “I had to change my algorithm so I wouldn’t be shown them as it’s obviously not what you want to see amid a breakup.”
Alice Oram, 26, told me her Instagram Reels feed picked up on her relationship collapsing almost before she did. “I would say that I got more ‘relationship problem’ type Reels — either comical ones about dumb boyfriends or ‘if your boyfriend does this, it’s a red flag’ ones,” she told me. “I assume it was because I was watching and sharing those with my friends to bitch about my boyfriend at the time and they would also send them to me. I would generally click off anything too cute and couple-y quite quickly anyway, maybe because I was in a shit relationship and was a bit bitter.”
Nowadays Alice’s feed has settled into a steady stream of style tips and TV compilations, but the relationship content still lingers, if only slightly. I began to come around to the idea that if I couldn’t expunge all the insufferable couples from my feed, I could at least shrink the number of them to a manageable size.
Day Five
Before charging back onto the frontlines, I decided to do the unthinkable and actually make a TikTok. “POV you’re waiting for the TikTok algorithm to work out you’ve been dumped,” I wrote on the screen as I filmed myself swiping restlessly. The video itself was hardly Oscar-worthy but I figured it would do the job. After triple-checking I had blocked my ex on every possible social media platform where he might see it, I filled the caption with the most pathetic hashtags I could think of, then I let my little bit of content fly.
I returned to the FYP a few hours later to see if this had made any impact. A mere five videos about boyfriends popped up, while I identified 19 to do with being single, heartbroken, or using dating apps. With Red (Taylor’s Version) now out in the world, distraught Swifties recalling casually cruel exes accounted for 16 of the TikToks I saw during my half-an-hour scrolling session. At long last, progress was being made.
Day Six
I checked back in with my video: over 1,000 plays. Hardly a viral banger but we were here for science, not clout. Ms Swift continued to establish herself as the main character on my FYP. Elsewhere, relationship content rose to 11 videos, while 16 clips about the tedium of online dating trickled back in like old friends I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. I peeped my screen time afterwards: I’d overrun the clock by 15 minutes. TikTok was starting to feel like home again, and my suggested searches had — thank God — been cleared of any mention of the b-word.
Day Seven
Exactly four weeks on from that awful, awful phone call, I opened TikTok one last time to see whether I had managed to successfully bend the algorithm to my will. The final scores: 17 videos about relationships, 24 about being single, 15 about being called up by your ex again and left feeling like a crumpled up piece of paper. Not ideal, but we were getting there. As I scrolled, one of my favourite TikTokers (the fit Scottish guy who says ‘ello — you know the one) appeared briefly to tell me I’d figure it out, because I always have. Several days on, I’m starting to believe he was right. I no longer feel dread about opening the app, which I guess means my mission was a success.
The odd bit of relationship content still shows its face on my For You Page, as brazen as those couples who insist on making out right in front of me on the Tube escalator. But in that way, as I have always known deep down, TikTok mirrors real life. To expect to be over a bad breakup in a week would be ambitious by any stretch of the imagination, so perhaps expecting the algorithm to force an about-turn so suddenly was also misguided. The truth is loved-up people are inescapable — even if you yourself are heartbroken and don’t want to see them. But both in life and on TikTok the only way forward is to look away, focus on the things you like, and let time do its healing.