Break Up, Break Down: Zoë Foster-Blake’s self-help app Break Up Boss won’t fix you, but it might help.

by Georgia Imfeld

It’s no secret we’re capable of doing pretty stupid things following a break-up.

We might drink too much, eat too little, make some regrettable phone calls, find some unsavoury shoulders to cry on; we turn every which way looking for answers, or distraction. So recently, when I found myself romantically wounded and with my thumb hovering over ‘BUY’ in the app store, I considered the purchase a write-off; just another questionable decision made in the week that follows a heartbreak. I was buying Break-Up Boss, Zoë Foster-Blake’s self-help app that tells us that while break-ups suck, we don’t have to suck at break-ups.

Break-Up Boss reads like a choose-your-own-adventure experience. Beginning with the “Feel Wheel” － a pie-chart looking thing made up of five wedges, each labelled with their own feeling or state of mind － you’re able to navigate through the app based on your current mood or reaction. Other features include “Text an ex”, which swiftly guides you around the potential humiliation/pain/foolishness of contacting your ex by allowing you to send them fake messages that disappear into the ether, and “Pep-Peps”, the app’s message delivery service which sporadically sends pick-me-ups to your phone － reminding us to get fresh air, to embrace change, and that, hey, our exes probably aren’t thinking about us. The bulk of the content reads like an advice column in a magazine, peppered with puns and perky asides.

Break-Up Boss is a playful self-help app. But why does it have to be playful? I get that we don’t have to suck at break-ups, but do we have to slap on mascara and wink at them? In this case, Foster-Blake’s trademark humorous tone does itself a disservice. It’s the digital equivalent to speaking in a higher register, or adding an upward inflection and “d’ya know what I mean?” to the end of a sentence that makes perfect sense. It’s as though Break-Up Boss doesn’t have the balls to be as good as it could be. I didn’t expect much from this app, but found it to be a resource of much more depth and value than the marketing and copy suggests. Break-Up Boss calls itself the “self-help book that doesn’t suck” and if you ignore the fact that it seems to assume “the Ex” to be male, and that at times the humour comes close to minimising the experience of the user, I think it might be right. It doesn’t suck, but why did I expect it to?

Don’t get me wrong, I like Zoë. Like many of us (583k, to be exact), I follow her on Instagram. When I first happened upon the marketing material for Break-Up Boss via Zoë’s Instagram － the bright and punchy promo graphics that promised to project manage our emotional trauma － I rolled my eyes and scrolled on. Because as well as her promotional posts about her new app, @zotheysay regularly shares snapshots of her Industry Fairytale marriage to Hamish Blake, not to mention their cartoonishly cute children. Is this the kind of friend you turn to help get you through a break-up, a self-proclaimed “insufferable, smug, married jerk” and widely adored entrepreneur? Probably not. And it seems Foster-Blake may have preempted this, surrendering what she can of her own foolish break-up behaviour stories in the opening paragraph of the app’s ‘about’ section, in an effort to convince us of her authority as Break-Up Coach™.

Despite its flaws, the app is far from a write-off. I wasn’t always interested in its “You Go Girl” brand of advice, and found that my sadness doesn’t respond well to pun-heavy humour, but beneath the peachy exterior is a kind-hearted, genuinely useful resource that is focussed on you. Its beauty lies in its promise to stay on topic, and the fact that it will continue to listen long after your poor friends have heard enough. I started to see its value more as time went on, as the initial sting of the heartbreak waned. Each jokes seemed a little funnier, each Pep-Pep a welcome surprise. I started to feel better, just as Zoë said I would. Just as everyone around me said I would. Just as I knew I would.

So, did I really need this app? Probably not. But as far as regrettable decisions made in the wake of a break-up go, it could have been a lot worse.