You could say that our cultural understanding of women’s autonomy isn’t totally in sync with the logistics of twenty-first-century partnership, and the internet would appear to agree. A 2015 thread on Reddit’s TwoXChromosomes board opens with a PSA: ‘You can break up with someone for any reason, or for no reason at all,’ it reads. ‘You don’t have to have a “good reason” to end a relationship.’

Posting under the handle MissPredicament, the page’s writer muses over the observation that an astonishing number of women in Reddit’s relationships forum seem to be mired in the same existential conundrum. They are unhappy in relationships that don’t really have anything wrong with them. ‘I wish someone had told me when I was much younger that I didn’t have to have an airtight legal case for a breakup – all I had to have was a desire to no longer be in that relationship,’ she writes. ‘I would have saved myself a lot of time.’ The post received over a thousand replies.