Both undergraduates and older adults would tell me about relationships that included breakups that didn’t take, relationships filled with cycles of fighting, ending a relationship and then getting back together over and over again. This would turn the end of a relationship into somewhat of a mystery, and the stories told became detective stories of a sort. In telling their breakup stories, people were piecing together a series of ambiguous and unclear conversations into an overarching narrative that revealed that a breakup had happened. And for Americans, often the medium becomes an essential clue in this unraveling.