How our WhatsApp archive became a digital graveyard

Katie Rosseinsky speaks to the experts about why hiding uncomfortable conversations is so tempting – and why such behaviour might not be the best solution in the long run

- Katie Rosseinsky

The graveyard of awful conversations. Where relationships go to die. The gallery of ghosting. The bad place. These are just a few of the harrowing descriptions that emerged when I asked a random cross-section of friends and colleagues to sum up exactly what is going on in their WhatsApp archives.

The messaging app’s archiving option has allowed its users to create and curate a nether world of digital chats we’d rather not think about right now (but somehow can’t bring ourselves to actually delete). If you’ve never used this function, and are wondering exactly what all the fuss is about... congratulations on having precisely zero skeletons in your closet and/or a healthily straightforward attitude to communication.

Say you’ve just been dumped. You can’t bear to keep seeing your ex’s profile picture crop up when you're trying to message your friends to moan about said ex. But you don’t want to obliterate the annals of the relationship entirely, because that feels too final (or too emotionally mature). Maybe you've just been on a stag or hen do, and the post-event debrief is a little too enthusiastic for your liking. Perhaps you're waiting for the answer to a potentially tricky question and are desperately trying not to mull over what the other person is thinking.

The (temporary) solution to all of these dilemmas? Simply swipe the chat from right to left, or tap and hold it – that’ll depend on whether you’re using Apple iOS or Android – then relegate it to the archive. Your problem is now out of sight and out of mind. And whereas once WhatsApp would brutally resurface your archived chats whenever the person or group you were hiding (or hiding from) sent you something new, it now keeps these banished communications in the shadows where they belong.