Facebook and Romantic Relationships - Essay Example

?Facebook and Romantic Relationships With invention of social media, the way individuals conduct their affairs has changed drastically, the old way of doing things and communicating has been abandoned in favour of the more technologically advanced methods. One of the areas in human lives that have been affected greatly by social media tools is romantic relationships. Initially, all forms of communication and information between people who were romantically involved were kept secret since communication was kept private between the parties. However, social media sites such as face book have redefined communication among romantically involved persons by encouraging the parties to reveal as much information as possible regarding these relationships. The trend of revealing romantically sensitive information has brought with it some advantages and disadvantages, but in most cases, this trend has led to break up of many promising relationships and broken marriages. This paper will look at the negative effects that exposing romantic relationships in face book has on those relationships. According to Flynn (nd), one of the ways that face book ruins relationships is through the amount of time that one spends in face book and the jealousy that comes with it. An online survey in face book that was conducted among people who were in a relationship asked questions regarding face book and feeling of jealousy such as if they got jealous when their partners added people of the opposite sex. Although the levels of jealousy that an individual feels is thought to be genetic, when an individual is exposed to information regarding his or her romantic partner’s friends and social interactions in face book leads to an environment that leads to jealousy (Marshall, Bejanyan, Di Castro & Lee, 2012). Large amounts of time spent on face book has been positively associated with negative relationships experiences in face book since an individual may be exposed to information about his or her partner that he/she would not have got were it not for face book. This would therefore lead him to increase surveillance on his spouse on face book, which in turn leads him to increase the time he spends on face book creating a vicious cycle of face book use. From another angle, jealousy may come from other people who are not happy with the relationship, this in turn may act as an incentive for the jealous people to look for ways and means by which they can destroy the relationships, though this may not be direct, this serves to destroy the romantic relationship (Tokunaga, 2011). The information that is discovered in face book, led to individuals creating events and situations that may have or may not have happened. This is confirmed by Muise et al (2009) when he conducted a study on face book users who were in relationships. This study found out that the participants reported feeling that face book setting formed feelings of jealousy and increased fears about the value of relationships that they had. The study found out that the participants who had never before felt any form of jealousy towards their romantic partners started developing feelings of jealousy after surveying them on face book while those who had previous feelings of jealousy got their feelings intensified after looking at their partners face book activity. This can be attributed to the revealing of otherwise unknown information about the spouses via face book. Spending too much time on the internet especially the social sites makes an individual to lose touch with reality, which creates distraction from the things that matter. People who spend a lot of time in face book have a tendency to have poor communications skills as they prefer to spend most of their time alone socializing with people in these social sites, this creates a strain in the romantic relationship which may in turn lead to breakdown of the relationship. Face book and other social platform have equally served as platforms through which romantic partners interact. However, complications are sited as to how the partners manage privacy in information being shared, relational needs as well as keeping pace with accountability of friends. Zhao, Sosik and Cosly evaluated the complications arising from the interaction of romantic partners from the online platforms. Through customized survey from a group of twenty face book users, it became apparent clear that management of information brings about strife and tensions especially as relates to managing various relationships simultaneously. The study affirmed the necessity of people adopting the social media wisely and appropriately in order to avoid possible strife from internal relations as well as tensions from outside as brought about by interactions on the social media platform (Zhao, Sosik and Cosly, nd) Another way that face book affects romantic relationships is through the nosey nature of human beings. When a person who is close to romantically involved persons online sees some activities regarding one of the people involved that may not be pleasing to the other, they are likely to exaggerate the event and they may report it in a bad faith therefore causing the relationships to break up. Such events are driven by jealousy especially on the side of the woman in case she wanted the man but she could not have him or out of malice as a way of revenging against one of the partners who may have done something bad. Some of the romantic relationships that are started in face book usually do not last long because what individuals portray in these social sites is not the actual representation of themselves, that is the information that individuals put in face book is an exaggeration of themselves to look appealing while in real sense, they may not posses those qualities. In addition, people put pictures in face book that show the best side of them, individuals seeing these pictures may fall in love with the person who in real life may not look like their face book pictures, this may cause conflicts and breakup of such relationships. As is the case with almost all relationships, there are times when the couple is usually not in good terms with each other, to some the only way they can vent their anger is through the social media such as face book. This behaviour is especially common with women when they have been mistreated by their partners. Instead of helping the relationship to recover, exposing private affairs regarding the disagreements in face book is likely to cause more problems, which may eventually lead to breakups. Due to the ability of face book to connect people from an individual’s past, the issue of the ex comes to play. When a person sees that his or her partner has contact with a person whom she had a romantic relationship with, she is bound to feel jealous and insecurity, which will in turn lead to confrontations with the spouse, suspected to be cheating leading to breakage of the romantic relationship. With the rise in cases of cybercrime, criminals can use information about romantic relationships in face book to carry out their activities. For instance, a hacker can get clues to the passwords that the couples use depending on their information in face book. In addition, these cyber criminals can send malicious messages to a couple with the intention of forcing them to break their relationship. The dynamics of romantic relationships especially in face book are usually affected by the participating individuals and the social ties that these individuals have as a couple and as distinct individuals. At the beginning of the relationship, each individual has a unique set of friends and social ties, however, as the relationship progresses and they interact with friend from their partners’ social networks, they develop a common social network that is composed of friends from both sides (Subrahmanyam, Reich, Waechter & Espinoza, 2008). One of the important issues to note here is that these shared social networks are not stable and they are usually changing and overlapping. For instance, when a person introduces his partner to his network and she makes friends causing their individual networks to overlap. In addition, in case of a strain in the relationship, the way these social networks overlap changes since the friends in these social circles are faced with a dilemma on who between the two conflicting romantic partners they should support. However, the effect of social networks in an individual’s romantic relationship is not always known before hand as it can have positive effects especially when the involved persons are in a conflict (Pempek, Yermolayeva & Calvert, 2009). Their shared social circles are likely to support the couple in resolving their differences instead of taking sides, which may increase the likelihood of these relationships ending. Privacy has been a concern among couples in face book who want to keep their romantic relationships private but at the same time enjoy the social interactions in face book. The amount of personal information that face book requires from its users can be described as ‘intrusive’ since it does not only require information such as age, gender and location, it also requires the user to provide his or her tastes and preferences in addition to his relationship status (Andon, 2006). This information is usually displayed to all the people in face book since the default privacy settings for personal information are usually public, which is usually not communicated to the users when they are joining the social network. Privacy concern among romantic partners in face book is complicated by the nature of face book privacy controls, which are meant to ensure that the users share as much personal information as possible. Accessing the portal to alter face book privacy settings is usually sophisticated and the information on how to go about it is not usually readily available. These negative influences of social networks were shown to affect negatively an individual’s esteem, which produced long-lasting effects to the person (Raalte, nd). To others, this has the capacity to increase the jealous and increase the monitoring tendencies, which equally leads to the question of how positive the media is. The study therefore concluded that the exposure of romantic information for persons by the social media might produce satisfaction in some instances through communicating personal status in romance while at the same time produce negative effect on lowering self-esteem (Utz and Beukeboom, 2011) In view of these problems that face book causes to romantic relationships, Flynn (nd) thought of a solution that can help people involved romantically to preserve their relationships from being broken by face book. The idea he brought forward is that people who are involved romantically should deactivate their face book accounts and work on their relationship from face to face interactions, as these will avoid the feelings of jealousy and insecurity that they felt after seeing their partner’s social activities in face book. In addition, those who opt to remain in face book, they should use the social media site for other purposes such as socializing with friends and not to survey on their spouses. References Andon, S. P. (2006). Evaluating computer-mediated communication on the university campus: The impact of Facebook. com on the development of romantic relationships. Flynn G. (nd). “How Facebook is ruining Your Romantic Relationships”. Retrieved from:< http://people.umass.edu/curtis/academics/researchtoolbox/pdfs/Genevieve_Flynn_LitReview.pdf> Marshall, T. C., Bejanyan, K., Di Castro, G., & Lee, R. A. (2012). Attachment styles as predictors of Facebook?related jealousy and surveillance in romantic relationships. Personal Relationships. Muise, Amy, Emily Christofides, and Serge Desmarais (2009):. "More Information than You Ever Wanted:Does Facebook Bring Out the Green Eyed Monster of Jealousy?" CyberPsychology & Behavior12.4441444. Academic Search Premier. Pempek, T. A., Yermolayeva, Y. A., & Calvert, S. L. (2009). College students' social networking experiences on Facebook. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 30(3), 227-238. Raalte L. et al, (nd). “The Impact of Facebook on Relational Satisfaction: Joint Networks & Joint Activities”. Retrieved from:< http://www.academia.edu/1024497/The_Impact_of_Facebook_on_Relational_Satisfaction_Joint_Networks_and_Joint_Activities> Subrahmanyam, K., Reich, S. M., Waechter, N., & Espinoza, G. (2008). Online and offline social networks: Use of social networking sites by emerging adults. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 29(6), 420-433. Tokunaga, R. S. (2011). Social networking site or social surveillance site? Understanding the use of interpersonal electronic surveillance in romantic relationships. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(2), 705-713. Tokunaga, R. S. (2011). Social networking site or social surveillance site? Understanding the use of interpersonal electronic surveillance in romantic relationships. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(2), 705-713. Utz S. and Beukeboom C. J. (2011). “The Role of Social Network Sites in Romantic Relationships: Effects on Jealousy and Relationship Happiness”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2011, 16; 511–527. Zhao X., Sosik V. S. and Cosly D. (nd). “It’s Complicated: How Romantic Partners Use Facebook”. Retrieved from:< http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~danco/research/papers/zhao-its-complicated-chi2012.pdf> Read More