Have you ever realized the amount of time you tend to spend scrolling through your social media accounts? An average millennial spends eight to ten hours a day checking their several social media accounts. Technology definitely has made our lives easier but finally, the negative effects of it are coming in limelight. This has not only affected our day-to-day life but effects of social media on relationships is pretty evident.
We don’t doubt for a second that social media not only helps at the beginning of relationships and maintaining them. But slowly it’s also becoming one of the prime reason behind the ending of modern relationships. Right from lack of trust to communication is several reasons why relationships fail. Social media’s contribution to this might seem endless, it has negative effects on a relationship.
Next time you go out for dinner- observe yourself and others around you. You’ll find more than 60% of people glued to their screens including kids and couples including yourself. The urge to constantly updating your personal accounts and following up the activity on others is rising and how. While social media was originally created as a networking tool, it has gradually increased on us and has become the most important part of our lives. So much so we often tend to avoid people and sideline our relationships due to this addiction.
This marshals us to find out the primary reasons behind negative effects of social media on relationships. Let’s look at what it means.
Lack of communication
Communication is the key to any healthy relationship. Every relationship goes through its ups and downs, but a healthy communication can make it easier to deal with conflicts. The lack of it could lead to one of the two partners or both feel miserable.
Before the age of social media, people use to communicate face-to-face with each other. This let you seep into the emotion of other person and help understand the tone and vibe of the moment. Physical communication is now replaced by technology. 90% of the population uses instant messengers or social media applications to communicate. This could lead to misunderstanding and conflicts as its difficult to read human emotions while sitting behind the screen.
Another common complaint most couples have these days is the number of hours their partner spend handling their social media accounts and neglect their significant other. This could lead your partner to feel miserable and neglected which could ultimately cause serious damage to a relationship. The best way to avoid this is by striking a balance between personal and social media life.
Infidelity & Jealousy
While social media plays a pivotal role in keeping people connected, it could also make your partner insecure. Let’s accept that we all have insecurities and could get jealous easily around certain people. Finding incriminating information on partner’s walls or in their photos, your partner’s too much interest or communication with someone from the opposite sex or keeping in touch with an ex-partner are few examples of how jealousy peeps in.
The other bad influence of social media on modern relationships is infidelity. With the numerous online dating applications like Tinder, Bumble or even Instagram and Facebook, it has become easier to cheat on your partners. Social media creates a safe channel for people to cheat. It’s facile for someone to hide their identity on social media or create a different identity altogether.
Many people in a relationship can’t even figure out the fact their partner is cheating on them. This is due to two reasons. Firstly, spending a lot of time on your phone is not seemingly out of ordinary. It has become a way of leading our life. Secondly, erasing or hiding what goes on behind the screen is effortless using technology.
The highlight effect
Don’t we all get jealous looking at fun stories and post of our friends and influencers on Instagram? We often believe this is the way they lead their life and confuse the reel with real.
Whereas the reality is far from what we see on social media. Everyone puts their best moments on social media and we tend to believe the other person doesn’t face issues as we do in everyday life. All of this is a big lie. Everyone only highlights the best of everything they do- let it be the food they are having or places they are travelling to. One could be crying right after posting a smiling face picture because we want to broadcast ourselves as perfect instead of being ourselves.
We never really think behind the picture shown to us. This leads to insecurities, jealousy, dissatisfaction and discomfort. We start comparing our life to what other’s present to us on social media. It could lead to major inferiority complex and can affect your relationship with your partner to a great extent.
The right way of using social media is by not letting it affect your everyday life and relationships. We need to figure out the difference between being addicted and using technology for our benefits. The sooner we understand, the happier we live our life.
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