Is this the dark side of social media...making it easy for partners to cheat? In an article I read, Facebook is being blamed for the increasing amount of marital breakdowns. Lawyers were claiming that in 2011 Facebook was cited in 1 in 3 divorces.
I found many websites claiming social media played a massive part in cheating. There seems to be a view that social networking sites make cheating easy using the benefits that people (innocently) love it for: the ability to connect instantly, connect to many more people than we would before social media, it's online and accessible anywhere & anytime and the ability to have a different persona online than in your real life.
With regards to cheating, I think another reason that cheating could prosper is due to the way a relationship can easily progress through stages, moving from it's soft and relatively innocent initiation through likes & comments, into discovering shared interests, into an open conversation via news feeds, then onto private conversations. It's at this stage that the danger can escalate, as the communication is no longer public. The final stage is to meet in person. Some would argue that if you were intending to cheat on a partner, this whole process is a lot easier than meeting someone in person in the first instance.
There are many websites and blogs that discuss how to tell if your partner is cheating using social media. These are some commonly claimed signs:
- Late or early night online sessions
- A profile that doesn't match their true self
- A fake profile
- A profile page with little or no activity
- Passwords on everything
- Lots of frequent and private correspondence
- A sense of happiness that is only seen when they are online.
- Talk about their online friends more than their real friends.
- Cutting off the monitor or shutting down when you are around
I have no doubt that there are a lot of people using Facebook and multiple other social media sites to cheat. I also believe that social media can make it easier for someone to cheat. However, I do not believe for one second that social media is responsible for cheating. People must already be predisposed to that behaviour. Responsibility lies solely with the person who cheats. Social media is merely a tool that people use for connecting with each other. Like anything else, this tool can be used for less than desirable means. After all, cheating has happened since the dawn of time. When email, mobile phones and text messages were invented they all provided newer and easier ways for cheaters to carry out their behaviour.
What do you think, is social media is responsible for cheating? Or does it merely facilitate it? I'd love to hear from you about this or any other thoughts you may have.
Interesting... I think social media merely facilitates cheating.. It is rather the 'person behind the gun' that count.
ReplyDeleteThanks Risnandar. I agree. Scary how many people are doing it through social media though...not that there are accurate figures but going off the ones that are known.
ReplyDeleteI think social media has just made it easier for people to catch their partners out if they're cheating - all it takes is one little slip and one person will see it, who will tell another person and so on and so on until it gets back to the person being cheated on. But I'm sure the stats will decline as people get smarter about how they use the likes of FB.
ReplyDeleteThat's a very interesting thought. People probably will get smarter in avoiding detection. That's what happened when mobile phones came out. People changed the names of contacts in their phone to fake names to avoid detection from cheating.
ReplyDeleteHi Muz
ReplyDeleteI wrote a similar piece "Is Social Media ruining Relationships" a few weeks ago. I find it a fascinating topic.
My thoughts are if you want to cheat, you will cheat - social media merely provides lots of different platforms to do it. After all, before social media there were cheaters ie there'll always been cheaters!
What intrigues me the most is - will people eventually lose the ability to communicate with each other face to face if a entire generation (ie millenials) grow up only learning to connect with each other online? That is, is social media shifting cultural norms with regard to dating?
Hey Muz
ReplyDeleteI think that it just facilities it. I mean, it may provide more opportunities; I’m thinking of unhappy couples reconnecting with high school /past partners from way back on Facebook. But the urge to cheat needs to be there in the first place. A person happy in a relationship is not going to cheat just because of social media.
Thanks Yvonne. I completely agree. By the way, people re-connecting with old school flames etc is one of the main culprits of cheaters on social media.
ReplyDeleteHi Tanya,
ReplyDeleteThe bigger question of changing cultural norms is so fascinating. Surely the current generation will be incredibly impacted by social media etc. Just how this impacts their view of the world and ways of interacting with people and the world around them is yet to be known. I'm very curious!
I'll check out your blog post- it sounds interesting.