Warning: Social media can harm your relationship

Jitka and I have made a point of not befriending each other on Facebook.  Doing so would do little to help how we communicate with one another, whilst opening up the inevitable temptation to snoop on each other. 

An American psychologist has supported this point of view in an article published recently.

“Imagine starting a dating relationship and you find out the guy that you’re involved with has 350 female friends,” he said. “I mean, it creates a whole new kind of stress. You have all of this competition that you might not have known about before.  It might not have existed before.”

This comes at the same time as new research has explored how social media can cause stress in a relationship.  They found that the most common cause was sharing too much information on ones profile page.  Next up was the cardinal sin of tagging an ex in one of your photos.

“We weren’t built to think about the person we’re dating having so many other social contacts and friends that might compete with us,” he said. “We like that feeling of exclusivity, that we’re the one that matters first and foremost.”

If that's the case then I think I'll stick with my strategy and keep well away from Jitka's Facebook account.  It's an itch I just don't need to scratch.

Post coital activity

Speaking of the impact social media has on relationships, I wrote last year about a study suggesting as many as 3% of people log in to Facebook or Twitter in the moments after sex.  Pretty staggering in itself, but new research suggests that this might not be a cause for post-coital unhappiness in itself.  The key apparently is who falls asleep first.

Contrary to the popular myth that men doze off as soon as the act is done, the research finds there is no real evidence of that.  Indeed they found no real gender divide when it comes to who nods off first.  What they did find however that whoever is left awake after their partner falls asleep reported disatisfaction in the level of post coital activity (things like hugging, chatting and so on).  So if you want to be happy after sex you best get counting those sheep.

Related

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

5 thoughts on “Warning: Social media can harm your relationship

  1. It's madness really. I hate this trend of people announcing they've split up with their partner on Facebook, often before they even tell the other person. A private life is just that, you shouldn't be airing it all in public.

  2. Interesting topic. I wonder why some relationship every time they fight they change their relationship status to SINGLE and when they are ok they change it again to IN A RELATIONSHIP. it's like i want to tell them why is it every time i have a problem with my parents i didn't change my status to ORPHAN!? haha make sense right?

  3. Ah, man – the worst is Skype – I really need to learn how to erase my messages [ my GF sees little snippets of conversations when she walks in the room and twists the hell out of them! It's almost comical sometimes.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Captcha loading...