FACEBOOK AND ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

FACEBOOK AND ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS - Essay Example 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 indi vidual 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 de stroy 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 individ ual 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,