“We are getting a divorce. It has been in the works for a while now,” Lauren, a 36-year-old mother of two who resides in a small town outside of Austin, wrote on her Facebook page at the beginning of July, about her husband of 13 years. (Lauren is not her real name.) She was commenting on a response — a single, stunned “Huh?” — to the change in her relationship status. “Lauren went from being ‘married’ to being ‘single,’” read the dry, cold, unsympathetic recitation of fact. The infamous little broken-heart icon, the fixture you hope that, like some medical alert bracelet, you will never have to wear, fluttered up to hang alongside it. This is how life’s big moments unfold on Facebook: Epic emotions are reduced to emoticons.

During the month that followed, as the marriage continued to unravel and her grief intensified, Lauren began chronicling her divorce via status updates. “Lauren would cry, but then he wins,” she wrote. “There isn’t enough Kleenex in the world.” “My house is a mess. My life is a mess.” “Lauren is facing the aftermath.” Her very private ex-husband-to-be soon grew enraged. “I would write that I was upset or what have you, and he would assume that every negative thing I wrote was about him,” Lauren told me. “I didn’t feel like I was overstepping any boundaries, but he did.” When she began to write about her new relationship, her husband finally lost it. “I wrote that I was ‘Going to pizza night and beyond,’” Lauren said, “and he was offended by it. I thought it was vague enough.” Lauren’s husband then warned her that he planned to “un-friend” her. “So,” she said, “I did it first.” Call it “War of the Roses” on Facebook.