Facebook: Rising Cause of Divorce

Social media brought with it the ability to connect with old and new friends. It was labeled the solution to the problem of loneliness experienced by a more and more mobile generation. But nothing is without its drawbacks, as some divorce lawyers with enough time to peruse divorce petitions discovered.

They found one in five cited Facebook as cause for divorce.

“I had heard from my staff that there were a lot of people saying they had found out things about their partners on Facebook and I decided to see how prevalent it was,” Mark Keenan, Managing Director of Divorce-Online, told the UK’s Telegraph. “I was really surprised to see 20 per cent of all the petitions containing references to Facebook. The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to.”

Sexy chats. E-mails. Wall posts. Private albums. It used to be that affairs had to be conducted secretly on our own time. Now, they can unfold as we sit beside our spouses in bed, typing on our laptops as they read.

But is it that more people are cheating because of how much more accessible people are, or is it that it’s just easier for people to get caught?

This month’s issue of Details gives us some hard numbers in their article “Everyone Else Is Cheating–Why Aren’t You?”:

Numbers from the book Lust In Translation, by Pamela Druckerman.

“A lot of people are coming to terms with the unnaturalness of monogamy,” says David P. Barash, co-author of Strange Bedfellows: The Surprising Connection Between Evolution, Sex and Monogamy. “But there’s a difference between the public persona–what we like to think of each other–and what we all know goes on.”

And this, perhaps, is why Facebook is so dangerous.

Read the rest of this piece, including what’s wrong with marriage, at Twirlit…