We had a couple of people reach out and mention how they got into emotional affairs on Facebook – and almost into physical affairs. They really freaked themselves out and it’s thrown a real wrench into their marriage but they’re working on things now. While we’re not anti-social media, it’s time to realize the huge impact it has on marriage.

Social media is quite a new thing. Given that we don’t have our parents to warn us about the dangers, we have to prepare ourselves for it and also figure out the healthy boundaries we want to put in place to make sure we don’t get caught up in something that we never intended or wanted to happen.

Remember, very few people wake up in the morning and think, “I’m going to go looking to have an affair today.” Rather, it’s something we slide or drift into most of the time and it’s even easier to do that online than it is in person.

Internet Use and Romance

Let’s look at this generally to start with and then focus in on distraction, jealousy, and infidelity.

A study in 2014 looked at the relationship between social media usage, marriage satisfaction, and divorce rates by looking at surveys of married individuals as well as state-level data from the United States. The study found that:

The use of social media negatively correlated with marriage quality and happiness. (media use up, marriage down)

Use of social media positively correlated with experiencing a troubled marriage and considering divorce. (both increased together)

They continued to find these correlations even after taking into account various economic, demographic, and psychological variables that are known to be related to marriage well being. This suggests that social media plays a much larger role than we think in our marriages.[i]

Another study from the same year cited another interesting statistic: 1/3 of divorce cases mentioned Facebook. They also noted that the top Facebook concerns are inappropriate messages to individuals of the opposite sex.

That is a very specific use of social media which is detrimental to marriages, but what about social media use in general?

The Pew Research Center did a phone survey of couples on their social media usage and how it affected their relationship. Out of the individuals that they surveyed:

71% of married couples use social networking sites

10% of internet users who are married or partnered say that the internet has had a “major impact” on their relationship, 17% say that is has had a “minor impact” and 72% said that it has “no real impact at all”.

Of those who indicate that it did have an impact, 20% said that the impact was mostly negative, 74% said it was mostly positive, and 4% said it was both positive and negative.

8% of internet users in a committed relationship have had an argument with their spouse or partner about the amount of time one of them was spending online.

4% of internet users in a committed relationship have gotten upset at something that they found out their spouse or partner was doing online.

These numbers related more closely to relationship tension for younger adults between the ages of 18-29 due to larger consumption of social media.

18% of online 18-29 year olds have argued with a partner about the amount of time one of them spent online (compared with 8% of all online couples)

8% say that they have been upset by something their partner was doing online (compared with 4% of all online couples).[ii]

Now that we have an overview, we can get into some of the details, looking at three different areas in which social media negatively affects marriages. The point here is that you need to think about how and how often you’re using social media and make sure that you and your spouse are both good with this.

Distraction and Time

In 2007, Young looked at excessive internet use that qualifies as internet addiction. They define internet addiction as “any online-related compulsive behaviour which interfer...