Social Networking Trouble
Facebook has been on my personal list of Things Infamous ever since they crushed Violet Blue’s porn-free, ToS-honoring “Our Porn, Ourselves” discussion group out of existence, so it was with some pleasure that I was able to note a column by Sheril Kirshenbaum up at Bloomberg today entitled “Blame Facebook for Your Divorce.”
Divorce is apparently declining among most age groups of Americans, but it has more than doubled for people over 50. There are many possible reasons for this but at least one researcher thinks that social networking might be one of the causes.
Nancy Kalish, a professor of psychology at California State University, Sacramento, suspects that online connections may lead to growing numbers of what she terms “accidental affairs,” meaning they involve people who don’t set out to have a physical or emotional relationship outside their marriage. Kalish studies couples who reunite after years apart.
Before there was an Internet, when someone wanted to track down a past love, he or she had to go through the effort of locating a friend or relative to make contact. “Unless they were single, divorced or widowed, they just didn’t typically do that,” Kalish told me.
But now there’s the possibility of better living through technology.
But now the ghosts of romance past are alive and well online, popping up on chat services and sending greetings on Facebook. In the 21st century, old friends are virtually at our fingertips, and a seemingly harmless email sent to someone with the innocent intention of “catching up” can quickly go further. Many of those who engage in accidental affairs tell Kalish that they had happy marriages before they strayed. “They still bear responsibility for the affairs, of course; no one made them write, call or meet in a hotel room,” Kalish said. “But these are probably people who would not have cheated years ago, even with a lost love.”
The column then devolves into some pop-psychological speculation.
Facebook might not care if it annoys Dr. Faustus, and probably they’re right not to care. But now I guess they’re going to have the the bloodhounds of family values snappin’ at their rear ends.
They’d have been better off siding with the angels to begin with and leaving Violet Blue’s group alone, so I say.
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I’m not entirely sure the bloodhounds of family values give a rat about fornication or divorce among over-50s. However, I can’t quite put my finger on why I think so.
You might be right, though my intuition runs the other way: the hounds are quiescent because they just haven’t heard heard of swinging Grandma yet.
It’s a load of bullshit. There’s no such thing as an ‘accidental affair’: if you’re screwing around behind your partner’s back, it’s not an accident and it’s your fault and yours alone.
Mmm, that’s a harsh moral stance I don’t quite agree with.
Fault, sure. They did it, they own it.
But not an accident? Meh, I think people have moral/ethical accidents all the time. They do something a little bit wrong (send an “innocent” email that isn’t, quite) and it sets in motion a cascade of events that they never foresaw. Sometimes, life-changing events.
It’s not accidental in a “clearing blame” sense, but it’s accidental in a “never saw it coming” sense. It’s like having a piano fall on your head while peeping through a keyhole. You blameless? Heck no. But did you set out to get squished by a piano? Nope, that part was an accident.
My dad’s one of these people that found an old friend through social networking, cheated with her, and then left my mom. I think that the move is ultimately better for us all, though I’m concerned that my dad chose that order (contact, pursuit, consummation, and then telling my mom).
I would say that the social networks may be the enabler, in which case it is an accident (as you say, Bacchus). At the same time, I can’t help but see that my own dad’s insecurities led him to stay in a loveless relationship without divorcing, and try to have his cake (a loveless but stable relationship) and eat it too (a romantic extramarital affair). Without that opportunity, he would have likely just languished, and been just as unhappy for doing nothing wrong.
So I see it as encouraging, not greater unhappiness, but a trade of one kind of unhappiness for another.
Perhaps one reason why we don’t chide “swinging Grandma”, is that we fear we may not survive the verbal barrage of retorts that’s likely to follow…