Facebook has become an integral part of our lives ever since it was founded in 2004. With over 2 billion active users, it is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. While Facebook has connected people across distances like never before, it has also been infamous for causing rifts in relationships.
With features like the news feed, friend requests, and messaging, Facebook allows us to connect with friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, and even strangers. We get to know what’s going on in their lives through their posts, pictures, and updates. While this fosters a sense of closeness online, it also means that your partner’s life is more transparent than ever before. With visibility comes curiosity, and in some cases, jealousy and doubt. This lack of privacy can cause relationships to fall apart.
Facebook makes it easy to reconnect with old friends and flames, which promotes emotional cheating. It also enables stalking an ex’s profile or creeping on a crush’s updates. The always-on nature of Facebook means that your partner can maintain virtual contact with someone else round the clock. Liking, commenting on, and private messaging another person frequently can take time and attention away from your relationship. People in unstable or unhappy relationships may use Facebook as an escape to fill an emotional void. This emotional dependence on another person often leads to falling out of love with your partner.
Jealousy and possessive behavior can also ensue when your significant other interacts with someone you perceive as a threat. Fights can erupt over a seemingly harmless comment or like. Partners may become insecure from comparing themselves to others on social media. Lack of trust caused by Facebook snooping can damage an otherwise healthy relationship. Additionally, the anonymity of virtual interactions can embolden people to flirt online even while in a relationship. Virtual infidelity can be as devastating as physical infidelity.
Political, social, and cultural differences between partners get amplified on Facebook. Couples may realize their fundamental incompatibility when they discover their contrasts in worldviews on Facebook. Similarly, tagging a partner in an unflattering photo or post can induce fights.
All of this begs the question – how many relationships actually end because of Facebook?
Statistics on Facebook’s Impact on Relationships
In 2016, a study by the University of Copenhagen found the following statistics:
- Over a third of divorces in the US from 2010 – 2011 cited Facebook as a contributing factor.
- The top Facebook-related divorce reasons were reconnecting with an ex (21%), arguing over a partner’s secret usage (14%), and inappropriate messages to members of the opposite sex (13%).
- 5% of all divorces in the US that year involved the term “Facebook” in their filings.
A 2018 survey by TechJury yielded these insights:
- 61% of people using Facebook were likely to emotionally cheat via social media.
- 56% used Facebook rather than face-to-face contact to vent about their partner after a fight.
- 1 in 5 couples broke up over trust issues due to Facebook.
According to a 2021 poll by Houston PR firm Web Services:
- 42% of millennials admitted to stalking an ex romantic partner online.
- 63% of US adults between 18 – 34 survey admitted to ‘stalking’ someone else on Facebook.
- 38% of participants blamed Facebook or social media for a past breakup.
A 2022 survey of 2000 Americans by OnePoll had the following revelations:
- 1 in 10 people broke up with someone after finding suspicious activity on their partner’s Facebook.
- Nearly 50% of women and 38% of men admitted to looking through a current or ex partner’s Facebook to find clues about cheating.
- 35% broke up with someone after seeing how they interacted with an ex on Facebook.
Reasons Why Facebook Sabotages Relationships
Let’s look at the main ways in which Facebook undermines romantic relationships:
Encourages stalking and excessive monitoring of a partner
Facebook makes it easy to keep constant tabs on your partner and anyone else. Repeated monitoring of a partner’s profile, friends, wall posts, photos, status updates, and conversations borders on obsession and indicates underlying trust issues. Spying on a partner erodes mutual respect in the relationship. Additionally, it sets unrealistic expectations about knowing every detail of each other’s lives.
When taken to the extreme, Facebook surveillance of a partner can cross over into alarming and abusive behavior. Particularly for younger people who grew up with social media, stalking a crush or date online feels normal. But constant monitoring is neither healthy nor ethical without consent.
Triggers retroactive jealousy
Scrolling endlessly through a partner’s Facebook history with past partners, love interests, and exes breeds unhealthy retroactive jealousy. Retroactive jealousy refers to feeling threatened by a partner’s previous relationships and hookups that logically should not matter anymore. Yet on Facebook, the past is immortalized through old posts, photographs, conversations, and friends lists. This freezes a partner’s romantic history in the present.
You may logically understand your partner had a life before you. But Facebook shoves their prior relationships frequently in your face. This involuntary exposure to a partner’s past flames, indiscretions, heartbreaks, and emotional baggage can torment people prone to jealousy. It drags the past into the present.
Lowers barriers for reconnecting with exes
Remaining Facebook friends with exes keeps the door open for rekindling contact. A Facebook message is convenient, casual, and non-committal. Yet constant communication with an ex can undermine your current relationship. Even liking and commenting on an ex’s posts signifies you still care. People in committed relationships may hold onto exes through Facebook instead of cutting contact completely. This emotional tether to the past bridges old feelings into present-day relationships.
Promotes emotional cheating
Having secret online relationships is easier than ever on Facebook. Emotional cheating involves non-physical intimacy, desire, and passion for someone other than your partner. Facebook enables emotional cheating through:
- Private messaging romantic interests
- Flirting on posts and pictures
- Sharing intimate thoughts, feelings, and details about your life
- Online crushes and newly sparked connections
Partners devote their mental, emotional, and virtual time to fostering a sense of closeness with someone besides their partner. Emotional cheating creates distance between partners and diverts attention from resolving issues in the relationship.
Fuels arguments and jealousy
Facebook’s ubiquity means it’s almost impossible to completely avoid contacts that make your partner jealous – exes, old friends, former classmates, co-workers, etc. Running into past lovers frequently sparks arguments. Partners question innocent online friendships and resent time spent messaging opposite-sex friends. Fights ensue over tagging in unflattering photos, inappropriate comments, oversharing details about your sex life, controversial posts about divisive issues, and thoughtless likes or follows.
Partners get caught up in jealousy over who your friends or followers are, how many likes you get, or comparisons of whose life looks better on Facebook. The disconnect between your curated Facebook profile and real intimate life breeds resentment in relationships.
Highlights contrasts in worldviews
Our social media presence serves as an extension of our identity and beliefs. Following divisive issues like politics, social justice, and cultural affairs closely on Facebook highlights extreme differences in perspectives between partners. Discovering fundamental incompatibility in worldviews can change how you feel about your partner.
For instance, you may realize you don’t share the same values if your partner’s Facebook activity reveals racist, sexist, homophobic, unethical, or ignorant views. The anonymity of online interactions allows people’s ugliest opinions to surface. This forces partners to re-evaluate each other’s character and whether they bring out the best or worst in each other.
How Facebook Usage Undermines Relationships
Let’s explore how Facebook habits correlate to relationship problems:
Constant scrolling and notifications
Getting pulled into your Facebook feed interrupts quality time with your partner. The constant notifications and dopamine hits of new likes and comments are designed to hook you. When your partner’s eyes are always glued to their phone instead of you, it signals Facebook is a priority over your relationship.
Partners often get offended when phones are whipped out during meals, dates, conversations, intimacy, hanging out together, or supposed technology-free time. The compulsion to keep scrolling eats away shared moments. It signifies your partner would rather connect online than engage in your relationship.
Private messaging habits
Frequently messaging people of the opposite sex that your partner is uncomfortable with damages trust in relationships. Partners question who you need to be constantly private messaging and what you’re hiding. Deleting messages, guarding your phone, and distancing yourself during messaging are all red flags.
Sharing intimate thoughts, daily details about your life, relationship frustrations, emotional support, flirting, and virtual companionship should be reserved for your partner, not opposite-sex Facebook friends. Blurring those boundaries signifies your partner is replaceable.
Comparison and deception
Facebook profiles only showcase carefully curated highlights reels of people’s lives. Comparing yourself or your relationship to someone else’s falsified image breeds discontentment and unrealistic standards. Behind the veil of social media, many relationships face problems just like yours.
Partners also lie or embellish reality on Facebook to look more desirable. People deceive others about true feelings and facts about their relationships, infidelities, personal details, and hidden parts of their lives. Partners feel betrayed when their actual intimate life doesn’t match up with an idealized Facebook version.
Flirty comments
Your partner can view all your interactions on Facebook. Flirty, suggestive, or inappropriate comments you post on friends’ profiles indicates your relationship isn’t serious. Partners often view flirty Facebook exchanges as micro-cheating. Public posts also last forever as documentation if your partner ever questions your faithfulness and needs evidence.
Liking and commenting on an ex’s, crush’s, or attractive friend’s photos and posts also reveals you still care, find them desirable, or nurture hope. This hurts and threatens your partner.
Posting about relationship troubles
Venting about your love life publicly on Facebook rather than working through issues in person damages trust. It exposes private struggles to strangers. Partners feel blindsided and embarrassed finding out about relationship problems indirectly through Facebook posts. Oversharing intimate details online disrespects your partner’s privacy.
People posts often paint their partner in a bad light to elicit sympathy or justify their own wrongs. Publicly bashing a partner is immature. Facebook posts about fights or breakups also solidify the end of a relationship instead of giving partners space to work things out privately. Friends pick sides, the public watches drama unfold, and it’s harder to rebuild intimacy after exposing turmoil to the world.
Signs Facebook Is Undermining Your Relationship
Here are key red flags that social media may be sabotaging your romantic relationship:
- You argue about Facebook use frequently
- Your partner seems distant, withdrawn, moodier, or less attentive during and after scrolling Facebook
- You catch your partner hiding their phone or screen around you
- Your partner contacts exes on Facebook behind your back
- You don’t know your partner’s passwords anymore or vice versa
- Your partner stalks your profile, friends, photos, posts, messages, etc.
- You feel insecure, anxious, jealous, or threatened by your partner’s Facebook activity
- Your intimate life doesn’t match the version portrayed on Facebook
- You suspect your partner messaging opposite-sex friends inappropriately
- You or your partner flirt with other people through comments and likes
- Fights erupt over tagging in unflattering photos or controversial posts
- Your partner overshares private details about you or your relationship publicly
- You or your partner post vague negative things after fights for attention
Tips for Balancing Facebook and Your Relationship
To allow Facebook and romantic relationships to coexist harmoniously, here are some best practices:
Set boundaries and expectations
Discuss your boundaries openly surrounding Facebook use. Communicate what behaviors each of you are comfortable with and find unacceptable. Compromise when your boundaries don’t perfectly align. Revisit the conversation whenever issues come up.
Limit Facebook use together
Spend time daily or weekly completely off Facebook together. Dedicate your full attention to intimacy and communication without the distraction of screens. Prioritize your partner over your feed.
Be transparent
Practice complete openness around your Facebook activity. Leave your profiles logged in around each other, share your passwords, and give your partner full access to your phone and account. Volunteering transparency builds trust.
Meet emotional needs in person
Fill your partner’s fundamental emotional needs face-to-face, not online. Provide physical affection, undivided attention, deep conversations, intimacy, support during hard times, and quality time for your relationship.
Limit contact with exes/crushes
To respect your partner’s feelings, minimize unnecessary interactions with exes, former flames, and crushes on Facebook. Keep contact platonic, sparse, and focused on the past, not the present.
Avoid public drama
Argue respectfully in person if you disagree on something, not passive-aggressively through Facebook posts. Don’t use Facebook to vent about your partner or seek attention during fights either.
Present a united front
Even if you have issues privately, show a harmonious, positive version of your relationship on Facebook. Don’t air dirty laundry publicly. Handle conflicts off of social media.
How to Repair a Relationship Damaged by Facebook
If Facebook has already caused friction in your relationship, here are tips for restoring trust and intimacy:
Take a Facebook hiatus
Detoxing from Facebook for a set period helps re-focus energy on your partner. Avoid the temptation by deleting the app, logging out of your account, and finding new hobbies together.
Increase transparency
Regain trust lost from deception or emotional cheating by volunteering access to messages, your profile, email, and phone. Prove you have nothing to hide.
Block exes
Respect your partner by blocking exes and tempting past connections on Facebook to prioritize moving forward in your relationship.
Examine your underlying issues
Look beyond Facebook itself at the root insecurities, unmet needs, or stagnancy in your relationship driving you to use Facebook in unhealthy ways. Seek counseling to address these together constructively.
Renegotiate boundaries
Discuss what went wrong and set clearer guidelines for how to use Facebook appropriately as a couple going forward.
Make your partner a priority again
Plan thoughtful dates, deep conversations, and quality time together off of Facebook. Rekindle intimacy and romance in person.
Conclusion
Facebook’s ubiquity within modern romantic relationships means its potential pitfalls must be navigated mindfully. While Facebook itself is ethically neutral, poor usage and habits damage relationships. Partners must foster transparency, trust, healthy boundaries, and fulfillment in real life to prevent Facebook from sabotaging their happiness.
Ultimately, Facebook’s role in your relationship depends on the mindset and priorities of people involved. Couples who focus on open communication, emotional needs, and intimacy offline can use Facebook constructively for connection. But those lacking self-control or relationship skills easily let Facebook undermine their partnerships. Use Facebook to enhance your life and relationship – don’t let it replace real meaning, purpose, and love.