Does Social Media Destroy Marriages?

After writing Reflections I rolled through my post list and remembered this incomplete draft I had started:

Talk about burying the lead.

Granted, any London tabloid, like The Daily Mail, is far less concerned with presenting an accurate story than it is in selling the newspapers. But then even stories in Pravda have (had?) a grain of truth running through them.

Here is the headline:

The marriage killer: One in five American divorces now involve Facebook

A staggering 80 per cent of divorce lawyers have also reported a spike in the number of cases that use social media for evidence of cheating.

So what we have is that divorce lawyers are using Facebook as evidence of cheating, not that Facebook is causing it.

See the difference?

What we really have is a platform for people to escape their daily lives and create an "if only" fantasy world, and live in it. They re-connect with old flames, share a few flirty chats, and think they have a relationship.

Jealous spouse discovers this, goes nuts, and we have a divorce.

Which begs the question - how strong was the relationship to begin with?

One of the interesting (to me) things this brings up is that one of the first signs that an abusive relationship is forming is social isolation. The abuser attempts to gain control over who the victim can associate with, communicate with, in order to make the victim dependent on the abuser for a basic human need for connection. The victim will gladly accept abusive, hurtful connection as the only alternative to no connection at at all.

While I can gladly stand on "being right" for all of that, and take special delight in the link back to social isolation in abuse, I think I have to stand corrected a bit. Yes - these relationships are often constructed in fantasy, but what I have come to realize is just how easy it is for someone to slip down this hole without even realizing it until the emotional damage is done.

Does this make the players any less responsible? Of course not. And my question still stands - "How strong was the relationship to begin with?" But an online or virtual relationship, I have come to realize, can seem to overcome the limits of a real world one.

The feeling of attachment can be just as strong, or stronger. But in a real-world relationship we pick up on cues that contradict that feeling of attachment. We must actively seek to confirm or refute this evidence, and can only do it by taking more emotional risk.

But online those negative cues are nearly absent in the limited bandwidth. Subtle might not work here, and sometimes bluntly direct doesn't work either. This means no need to take so much emotional risk before building a belief that the connection is deeper.

Fantasy is a powerful thing. And what we have here is an emotional affair, not with anyone real, but with a partially fictional character that is constructed around the live interaction.

The only way out of this is to grasp reality and to accept the emotional risk of rejection in the real world - a far more dangerous place to play.