People attribute their divorces to a wide array of causes. Many say that financial problems and arguments over money are what ended their marriage. Others say that the divorce happened because of incompatibilities when spending time together, or even due to spending too much time apart. However, some divorcing individuals choose to blame something that didn’t even exist before the 21st century: Facebook.
A Chicago woman who is getting a divorce says that the popular social media site is the reason her marriage ended. More specifically, she claims that her own addition to Facebook was the culprit, starting when she got addicted to Facebook approximately five years ago.
At that time, she started spending several hours a day on the site. She told a Chicago news outlet that she was addicted to the site, posting pictures of herself to it and priding herself on the 1,000 followers and 5,000 friends she acquired. The time she spent on it was time that she should have spent with her family, according to what she told the news outlet. She now wishes that she had spent that time cooking family dinners, reading books with the couple’s kids, or actually talking in real life with her husband.
Instead, she got caught up with sending messages to people on Facebook. Problematically, those people included her ex-boyfriends. That fact apparently added to the dissension between the woman and her husband. They began to have arguments about her activities on the site. The arguments in turn led to the pending divorce.
Experts say that this is common. For many, social media sites are a way for one member of a couple to avoid spending time with the other. The one who becomes obsessed with social media may also use it to pursue other romantic relationships outside the marriage, leading to divorce. This is a good reminder to all to put real-world relationships above Facebook.
Source: Fox13, “Woman blames Facebook for divorce, she’s not the only one,” Ashton Edwards and CNN Wire, May. 06, 2015
