BOSTON (AP) — Andrew Curtin said it happened at least twice at his Boston-area high school in the last year. Angry about a breakup, a boy ended up at the school nurse’s office with a broken hand after punching a locker or a wall.

“You don’t think about when you see two people walking down the hall, ‘Are they in a bad relationship or is it good?’” the 17-year-old Waltham High School senior said Thursday.

But he was among about 250 teenagers doing a lot of thinking about healthy relationships at a seminar at Simmons College on Thursday. And the dating advice was coming from an unlikely source: city government officials.

Boston’s Public Health Commission partnered with local social service agencies to put on its third annual “Break-Up Summit” for teens as part of a $1 million, four-year grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Nationwide, the $18 million program known as Start Strong is aimed at teaching teens in 11 cities to prevent dating violence. Counselors in Boston on Thursday focused on teaching teens to end relationships in ways that don’t spark negative behavior like cheating, public humiliation, or worse.

Nicole Daley, who heads Boston’s Start Strong program, said a bad teenage relationship can lead to problems like depression, low self-esteem, falling academic grades, and even unwanted pregnancies in cases where one partner tries to manipulate the other. There’s also the risk of a physically dangerous confrontation.

“In popular media, cheating is seen as an excuse for violence,” Daley said.

Recent studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed about 10 percent of students nationwide reported a boyfriend or girlfriend had physically hurt them in the last year. CDC statistics also showed that among adults who were victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner, 15 percent of men and 22 percent of women first experienced some kind of partner violence when they were between 11 and 17 years old.

Teens who were part of Thursday’s seminar described a dating scene where social media can make ending relationships even more emotionally fraught. Many said that changing one’s Facebook status back to “single” was the worst way to break up with a significant other.

“The world knows before you do,” said Cassie Desrochers, 17, another Waltham High senior.

Being only 22, I’m not sure what relationships were like before cellphones and social media. But from talking to my parents about their own, it’s very apparent that 

1. It wasn’t a huge deal if you didn’t hear from your significant other every two hours
2. The entire world (or your entire friends list) wasn’t privy to the intimate details of your relationship

Now, the whole game has changed — and it doesn’t seem like the change is a positive one. I know from experience how annoying relationships can become when everyone is expected to be immediately available at the touch of a button. And I know too that just about everyone is braver (and more cruel) via a text message or Facebook post. So when relationships go awry these days (and there is now more reason for them to go awry, whether it is reasonable or not), the consequences are becoming significantly more damaging — whether because they are sent through a text message or posted on a wall for all to see. 

What are your thoughts on modern-day relationships and the effects of cellphones and social media upon them? Should we (and our relationships with others) be evolving to accommodate technology, or should education evolve to teach kids how to handle relationships in such a technologically-dependent world?