The Other Side of Facebook
In my last blog post I wrote about how Facebook and social media affects our romantic relationships in a negative way. While delving into my research I came across an article posted on Psychology Today titled “How Facebook Affects Our Relationships,” yet instead of posting all negative ways Facebook contributed to our relationships they posted a couple times social media helped develop our romantic relationships in a positive manner. Challenging my previous post, this reading made me realize that social media was not all bad.
Psychology Today writes, “Facebook makes new relationships more easily accessible.” Making relationships more approachable supports the fact that Facebook itself as a company had the goal of creating a network of people, some who you may know and some who you may not to make the process easier to communicate with one another. Seeking other friendly faces and maybe even compatible partners is easier with Facebook because if a friend or acquaintance knows the other you feel more secure about reaching out to them and starting a conversation. You may even be able to find your compatibility and make conclusions about whether you want to start a new relationship with that person.
The second point that Psychology Today makes is, “Facebook allows you to integrate your social network with your partners.” With Facebook being able to see who is friends with who and due to posting messages on each others walls or liking each others posts finding friends from a page you are looking at is effortless to build valuable friendships. “Facebook provides great convenience… making the integration of friends easier than ever,” meaning if you have an established romantic relationship already then fabricating connections with your significant other’s friends is easier. In fact, a study being done to demonstrate that people can actually figure out who someone is dating based on their mutual friends and how these friends were dispersed proved to be accurate.
Lastly Psychology Today posts, “Facebook can help you practice relationship maintenance techniques.” Facebook permits others to feel satisfaction within their relationship even if they aren’t physically hanging out with one another. This claim is reinforced with the statement, “We can keep our relationships strong by having positive interactions with our partner, and providing them with assurances- declarations of love and commitment.” They go further to explain that when one person in a relationship shows love in their statuses or posting a picture with them helps their partner be reassured and helps them feel loved by the other person. Constantly reminding a person of this very valuable within a relationship and can help relationships flourish.
After contemplating these opposite claims, I believe that there are both good and bad ways in which Facebook affects new or developed relationships.Throughout reading this beneficial article it helped enlighten me that not all uses of social media can lead to divorce and cheating like the last article I read claimed. I have finally developed my own opinion while taking these readings seriously but with a grain of salt and my opinion is this: overall I think using social media, more specifically Facebook, not in excess but with moderation can be beneficial to your romantic relationship. Facebook has the potential to becomes full of possibilities for new forming relationships that wouldn’t be possible without it, yet if you become obsessive over this platform it can guide you to a destructive relationship and do more harm than good.
