How our WhatsApp archive became a digital graveyard

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 andor 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 sigh 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.

Thirty-two-year-old Jess is an inveterate archiver (or should that be archivist?). “The archive section is where I put all my fizzled-out conversations with guys from dating apps or just the chats with people who outright ghosted me,” she says. “When I’m in the middle of that situation, it always helps not to have to see their old messages. And then when I’ve moved on, I guess it seems kind of funny. Or sometimes, if you’re romanticising someone, you can remind yourself of how they actually treated you.” She always knows when a relationship is on the way out, she adds, because she finds herself temporarily quarantining her partner in this digital graveyard. Brutal.

But it’s not always a death knell. A colleague tells me that as well as using the archive to store chats with exes, as a way of drawing a line under the relationship, she has also resorted to it during the early, butterfly-inducing stage of getting to know someone, in “that period when you’re really anxious about when you’re next going to hear from them”, she explains. “It’s like I’m trying to trick myself into forgetting about them rather than waiting for the next message — out of sight, out of mind! Of course, it doesn’t really work.”

And sometimes, it’s just practical. One of my good friends is a prolific archiver, filing away any chats that she’s not using that day; she sees it simply as good digital organisation, rather than a way of shirking difficult emotions. Indeed, it can also be a “pragmatic tool for managing digital overwhelm”, says therapist and British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) member Daniel Mills-Da’Bell. “Many people archive chats simply to declutter their inbox, reduce constant notifications or prevent distraction.”

But let’s return to those other, knottier reasons for hiding your chats away. Archiving difficult conversations “can serve as a form of emotional distancing”, explains Dr William Van Gordon, associate professor in contemplative psychology at the University of Derby. That’s because it can “reduce the immediate visibility of those exchanges, easing anxiety by limiting exposure to distressing cues”, such as your ex’s grinning WhatsApp photo. This lines up with theories of cognitive avoidance, he adds, which explore how we might temporarily suppress potential stimuli or triggers to manage our emotional discomfort.

Removing the visual triggers associated with a distressing conversation, such as their name or a message preview, Van Gordon continues, can form a “cognitive buffer” that might “help to disrupt the cycle of rumination”, a spiral of “repetitive negative thinking linked to heightened stress”.

And when you feel like you’re trapped in a situation that you can’t really control, distancing yourself from the conversation in this way “might be a way to assert some personal autonomy, even if the other person is not aware of it”, adds psychotherapist and author Eloise Skinner, or to “establish or strengthen a psychological barrier, putting a boundary between ourselves and someone else”. Plus, it simply puts in place another effort barrier or obstacle to access, giving you that extra moment to question why you’re about to go and lurk in the chat again.

If you’re into attachment theory (or perhaps you’re just constantly bombarded with videos about attachment styles, courtesy of the algorithm), you might not be too surprised to learn that these tactics might be more common in people with avoidant attachment styles, “who manage relational discomfort by withdrawing rather than confronting it”, explains Daniel Mills-Da’Bell, therapist. Those who tend to be anxiously attached, he adds, “may archive temporarily but find themselves checking again, oscillating between avoidance and hypervigilance”, while those “prone to conflict avoidance may see it as a way to ‘mute’ distress without fully resolving the underlying tension”.

Indeed, all of the therapists that I speak to agree that using the archive is very much a temporary fix, not a permanent solution — or, as Mills-Da’Bell puts it, “a surface-level coping strategy”. Ouch. So, “while it might soothe feelings of being overwhelmed, it doesn’t resolve the emotional issue itself”, he says, and if you find yourself doing it all the time, “it risks reinforcing avoidant coping patterns rather than fostering healthier communication or emotional processing”.

And if you truly want to move on, “create healthy distance and reduce the emotional pull of ‘access anxiety’ of a difficult conversation, deleting is often the most decisive step”, says psychotherapist Karen Hartley. Archiving, she notes, “keeps the door open, which can drive rumination and the temptation to reread, reinterpret, and reopen emotional wounds.” Going all out and deleting, however, “is a behavioural commitment to letting go. It actively removes the trigger and supports the cognitive process of moving forward”.

Essentially, Hartley adds, the archive folder is “a digital closet where unresolved feelings are stored, potentially increasing anxiety about the eventual need to confront them”. Using it is a bit like throwing all of your mess into a drawer, slamming it shut and promising to tidy it up another day (while hoping it doesn’t explode in the meantime). “True relief, as Hartley puts it, “comes from processing the core conflict, not just hiding its digital reminder.”