Why the Texas breakup went so viral

The new incentives of turning your pain into content. vox.com/culture CULTURE   The Wednesday edition of the Vox Culture newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. The Wednesday edition of the Vox Culture newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. 💔 Dumped? Divorced? Time to go viral. 💔 It’s a tale as old as time: a devastating breakup comes out of nowhere without warning, shattering our sense of self and potentially our living arrangements, our friendships, our families. A more recent phenomenon is when that breakup goes massively viral after the injured party documents their heartbreak for the camera. That’s what happened when 29-year-old musician Jillian Lavin, who goes by her stage name Spritely, [posted a video]( about the demise of her relationship in the form of a song. “Imagine,” she sings with pop-punk malaise, juxtaposed with a video of herself crying, “you live in LA with your boyfriend and everything’s going amazing.” It does not remain that way. As Spritely sings, said boyfriend of three and a half years tells her he wants to move to Texas to be closer to his family. After she takes months off of work, quits her improv troupe, and drains her savings to make the move with him, he hands her a note that says they’re “incompatible.” There’s humor in the video, despite its dark turn. “How did I not notice? Wow, what a surprise! Thank you for informing me that this whole time we had nothing in common!” she sings against an increasingly frantic beat, abruptly ending with the fact that she’s now living in Florida with her mom. [Logan Paul] Within a few days, the video had made it to Reddit’s front page. It currently has 64 million views [on X](, 20 million views [on Instagram](, and nearly 3 million [on TikTok](. At some point, Katy Perry liked it. All of which puts Spritely in an odd but increasingly common position: A terrible event in her life has given her the kind of attention many artists would kill for. For Spritely, it was the virality she’d been after for years as a working musician: She’d already built up a sizable following on TikTok and Instagram and had gone viral before, mostly for her reimaginings of popular songs in the style of other artists (what if Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” [was hyperpop](, or what if [Lana Del Rey sang Nickelback](?). “I spent probably 60 percent of my time the past year trying to make content, and the last week outpaced that,” she tells me. Since she posted the video on October 14, she’s doubled her [Instagram following](, up to 88,000. The success came after an EP she’d worked hard on — ironically, about the “fairy tale” love story she had with her ex-boyfriend — was released in January 2023 to little fanfare. “It’s a hard industry, mostly nothing happened with it,” she says. “Now that it’s the demise of that relationship, all of a sudden people are seeing that EP.” The “joke song,” as she calls it, was written in about a half hour, and she didn’t intend to post it right away. If she’d known it would go viral, she says, “I would have saved it for way further down the line when I was much more prepared. Because the truth is, I am still very, very much in the throes of heartbreak.” On top of the thousands of comments expressing condolences to Spritely and sharing their own relationship horror stories, there were others making threads about how she was “[codependent](” and missed [earlier red flags](. This is, of course, the risk of virality: Get enough attention and skeptics are inevitable. One of the biggest criticisms of Spritely’s video was her decision to post it at all. “There are certain things that happen to you that are stupid and unfair and that you absolutely should not keep posting about,” [wrote podcaster Liv Agar](. “I just inherently don’t trust people who upload videos of themselves crying onto the internet,” [added author Bolu Babalola](. That choice — to share something deeply personal, in vivid, vulnerable detail — has never been a straightforward one, but there’s never been more incentive to [divulge on the internet]( when you’re at your most emotionally raw. If you’re an artist who knows that one of the very few ways to build a career without a big budget or the backing of a major label [is to hit the viral jackpot](, posting about your personal life can be worth whatever might come after. [Continue reading ]( Clickbait - Instagram is [hiding your political posts](. - [TikTok Shop is selling]( black market Ozempic, PEDs, and cosmetic filler. - Anyone can [turn you into an AI chatbot](. Good luck trying to stop them. - Did that song organically go viral on TikTok, [or was it paid for](? - Why more influencers are leery of [showing their faces](. - The hypermasculine [sales influencers of the new manosphere](. - They're TikTok famous. Can they turn [it into a DJ career](? - Everybody's [feeling flirty!]( (But perhaps [not exactly sexy](.) One Last Thing Justice for [the chronically online](.   [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [YouTube]( Manage your [email preferences]( or [unsubscribe](param=culture). If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring [contribution](. View our [Privacy Policy]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.