"The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to," said Mark Keenan.
Facebook, MySpace and twitter are leading to more and more divorces. Divorce-online.co.uk studies 5000 different divorces files from the United States. The researchers found that 20% of those had a Facebook some where in the divorce papers. Senior digital investigator Giovianni Masucci at National Digital Forensics, Inc. states,”half the social media cases they investigate expose some sort of cheating”(Chen, S). The article does not mention any information about other social networking sites like Twitter or Myspace. It seems to me that if someone in a marriage is willing to have a sexual chat with someone other than their spouse on Facebook the marriage was headed for a possible divorce anyway.
According to CNN lawyers are using social media like Facebook to build cases for their clients (Chen, S). Divorce Attorney Lee Rosen says he uses websites like Flowtown.com to find all of the social media pages that someone may be using. Recently divorce lawyer Ken Altshuler represented a woman who was divorcing her husband because of alcohol abuse. The husband denied the accusation and claimed to have quit drinking. However, the lawyer was able to find a photo of the accused husband drinking a beer on Facebook. Professor of Psychology Elizabeth K. Englander at Brightwater State College in Massachusetts gives a reason to why some people post their whole life online even when they are seeing another woman or man. Englander states, “ the sense online is sort of like the mob effect, you feel like you're one in a million, and so who will ever notice you?
While I do not and would never condone cheating on or lying to your spouse at least do not treat them as if they are stupid and blatantly post photos of you cheating and lying.
Chen, Stephanie. 2010. Divorce attorneys catch cheaters on Facebook. Retrieved from http://articles.cnn.com/2010-06-01/tech/facebook.divorce.lawyers_1_privacy-settings-social-media-facebook?_s=PM:TECH
O'Donnell, Matt. January 4, 2010. Study: Facebook often leads to divorce. Retrieved from: http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/bizarre&id=7199535
6 comments:
I honestly thought this issue was a comedic item that all late night just joked about.
But the reality is it does happen and we as adults should monitor ourselves better.
I am guessing that cheating over the internet is just as inappropriate at times as if they were in the same room.
Very informative and I would like to do more study on this issue.
Yvonne H
Yeah, not a latenight joke anymore. Really happening at an alarming rate. Although I bet that if an age group was studied you would find that it is the younger age group like mine that is getting divorced over social media more often. The fact is I feel cheating through social media or another form of communication is just as bad as cheating in the traditional way.
It really does happen and actually it has happened to me. It starts out harmless but it can become so much more its just like in real life...when your playing with fire, your gonna get burned.
My wife has a co-worker that is going through this problem now. It's best to always cherrish the one you married.You never know how long you have here together. Besides marriage is for life.
Many people do not veiw their behavior as inapporiate because there is no physical contact, but an emotional affair is still an affair.
I wonder if infidelity is more prevalent in the internet age or if it's just more observable. Is the internet creating this problem or is it just exposing it?
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