Of course, many people do manage to dredge up the strength and resolve to actually break up with their dates. The problem is, they do it via email. Or voice mail. Or through some impartial third party such as DumpADate.com, which will send a private prerecorded message (and/or lovely floral bouquet) to the person you don’t want to see anymore.

In our ever more responsibility-free world, in fact, breaking up with someone face-to-face is becoming almost passé. The Digital Dump is now so common—and so handy—that Internet dating sites have started incorporating it into their services.

Fun Fact: In a survey of four thousand singles conducted by Match.com, 14 percent said they had broken up with someone via email, 20 percent said someone had broken up with them via email, and 14 percent had had it happen both ways; 53 percent had never been involved in a digital dump.

• Been the victim of a digital dump? Groan and gripe here.

• When are online breakups okay? Weigh in here.

“Match and Yahoo personals now have canned rejection statements that you can send to people,” says Albert, a 69-year-old single from San Francisco. “You only have to click a button and you can send a message that says, ‘You’re a nice person but I don’t think we’re a match.’ You never even have to contact them. It’s hard rejecting people, but I think that’s being rather cowardly.”

Cowardly or not, it’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s becoming more and more acceptable, at least for those short-term Internet flings. When it comes to LTRs, of course, any kind of Digital Dump is bad juju.

“A friend of mine actually left a message on a woman’s answering machine to break up with her,” says Robert, a 37-year-old single from Olympia. “He couldn’t understand that you should break up with a woman in person. Especially if you’ve been sleeping with her for over a year.”

Still, voice mail and digital breakups do trump an invisible dump. They can even provide a safe platform for clearing up misunderstandings, airing grievances, and expressing feelings that are often difficult to put into words, especially when a vase is careening towards your head at 90 miles an hour.