Is Social Media Breaking Up Relationships?
One would like to think that relationships are a dynamic between two people. However, we all confide in our friends and family who act as our counsel. Many times, we are so invested and know so much that their relationships are ours as well.
One of the biggest misnomers is that social media causes problems in relationships. After hearing a few stories from friends and looking back on a few of mine I have developed a theory. How a couple handles social media is a microcosm of their relationship. People at times, me as well-catch a lot of feelings based on what they see from significant others on their profile pages and timeliness. Because most of what we see online is hyperbole, I say that social media is “just a video game.” How we perceive the stimuli is more of a reflection of ourselves than what people are actually posting. Here are a few instances that made me come up with this...
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I have a friend who was in a long-term relationship. They had been together for a few years and cohabitating for one. He felt that he had nothing to hide from his girl because he loved her dearly. One day he was on Facebook. We all have just browsed down our time line and wondered how someone was doing. He came across his puppy love girl from high school and got curious. After looking at her page he thought about deleting his browser history because there was the possibility of his girl flipping out even though he felt hadn't done anything wrong. If she happened to look and she had a question he would answer honestly. "Babe, I was just curious and while looking at her I started to think about how happy I am that I found you." Knowing him, he meant that.
Of course she looked up the browser history, which traditionally was something out of character for her to do. He had so much confidence that he wouldn't be doing anything disrespectful to their relationship that he would often keep his profile signed in. So she confronted him about what was he doing on his ex's page. Instinct kicked in and he at first told half of the truth. He'd seen some pictures of some cause she was supporting and got inquisitive. She then said that he was lying because the browser history said otherwise. He then said to her "Babe, I was just curious and while looking at her I started to think about how happy I am that I found you." His girl was not hearing it.
About a week later he was on their community laptop and just felt that something was different. He looked at the browsing history and noticed that it was clear. He then looked at his Facebook page and noticed he had twenty-to-thirty less friends than he did the day before. She had deleted girls she thought that he was attracted to.
The issue in their relationship was trust. In spite of having some rough patches he trusted his girl. She would often say she trusted my friend and that she doesn't think he'd be faithful. However, she didn't trust other women. I have heard that phrase in some capacity from many different women. She even yelled at him saying "Who is XXX ?. He responded "Your cousin". So her distrust in other women was so blinding she didn't pay attention to someone who was family.
She just wanted to know that she was special. While he let her know this the best ways that he knew how, sometimes that didn't register. We all do this. We try to show love in a way that is comforting to us that we are being impervious to the needs of our significant others. He assumed she would do things the way that he would and he'd show he loved her by being reactive when what she wanted or needed was proactive reassurance.
For the second example I will tell a story about myself. I was seeing someone for a little over a year. We both wanted to play things down by saying we were just friends; but everything about our dynamic suggests that we were in a full-fledged relationship. We were both commitment-phobes, so I think actually saying it was a relationship made us both uncomfortable and we would run for the hills. Everyone knew we were in a relationship, too. The running joke with my friends was that we should just go public and everyone would respond "We KNOW!"
Being phobic of commitment was us protecting ourselves. We'd both been through some traumatic experiences. The thing is our insurance policy of staying guarded isolated the other and we never articulated how we really felt. We were friends on Facebook, followed each other on Twitter, and almost everything other outlet with the exception of Instagram. In retrospect, that was kind of dumb because the pictures would show up on other social media outlets since they are all connected.
We lived very different lifestyles. She didn't have any children and my daughter Cydney was alive. I didn't want to see her pictures, tweets, or comments of the life she was living because her job potentially opened up the door for her to meet someone else...we're just friends, right? I know she'll never admit this to me; but she wouldn't follow me because Cydney gets a lot of attention from women and that was something she didn't want to see, either. We're just friends, right?
One night she was supposed to meet up with a friend of mine and me. Before she'd gotten there I was telling my friend about this very special non-relationship of mine. I told my peer that recently I liked and commented on a picture she posted on Instagram without following her. Our relationship was psychological competition. I did it go provoke a response. Since we weren't straight up about our feelings one would do something that would create a knee-jerk reaction and we could see how the other really felt about the other. My Today's Horoscope All’s fair in love and we were rewriting The Art of Wa r.
When the three of us were talking, my "girl" started venting to my friend about so many things that I do that bothered her. She brought up a few things I'd told my friend only fifteen minutes earlier in a tone of voice that one could only call "being in one's feelings." I laughed in my head. On her own, my girl brought up the Instagram incident. At this point she was pretty worked up and my friend just shot me a look that said "I hate you," and sent me a text saying "The two of you bickering about nothing is a dead giveaway you are not just friends!"
The way we handled social media was just like our relationship. We were 3/4 there in all other realms. But we needed to keep one aspect to ourselves for protection. That one bit did more harm than good because of the reasoning. The freedom we desired opened up the door for us both to assume someone else could come into our lives and take the spot we wanted. As opposed to talking it out we just left it and it only made things worse. Had we done so there is a strong possibility that we could have been happy.
I say this for us to keep in mind for our friends' relationships because it is almost impossible to be objective in your own.
Is social media breaking up relationships?