is facebook contributing to divorce stats?

there have been a few articles recently on the subject of how facebook is contributing to people cheating on each other & ultimately causing divorces.  Social networks definitely give people a virtual community that can be supportive & distracting when someone is facing challenges within a relationship.  Anything on the net can be a distraction from addressing problems in real life.  It’s the line of least resistance & communicating directly with a partner or getting couples counseling requires a lot more effort & commitment.

‘My divorce came to me as a complete surprise. That’s what happens when you haven’t been home in eighteen years.’  Lee Trevino

I read the Guardian article Facebook a top cause of relationship trouble, say US lawyers: Social networking site becoming primary source of evidence in divorce proceedings and custody battles, lawyers say & you can read a quote from this article below.

A 2010 survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML) found that four out of five lawyers reported an increasing number of divorce cases citing evidence derived from social networking sites in the past five years, with Facebook being the market leader.Two-thirds of the lawyers surveyed said that Facebook was the “primary source” of evidence in divorce proceedings, while MySpace with 15% and Twitter with 5% lagged far behind.Those statistics included not just evidence of infidelity but other legal battles, such as child custody cases in which parents deny using illicit drugs but boast of smoking marijuana on their Facebook pages.Photographs harvested from social networking sites – including those posted by friends or colleagues on their own pages – are a particularly rich source of damning evidence, according to divorce lawyers.”This sort of evidence has gone from nothing to a large percentage of my cases coming in,” Linda Lea Vicken, a member of the divorce lawyers’ group from South Dakota, told the Associated Press.Marlene Eskind Moses, president of the AAML, said the openness and sharing of social networking sites left their users’ public and private lives more exposed.”If you publicly post any contradictions to previously made statements and promises, an estranged spouse will certainly be one of the first people to notice and make use of that evidence,” said Moses.Statistics for January from online analysts Nielsen showed 135 million people in the US visiting Facebook during the month – nearly 70% of the country’s internet users. On average, users spent more than seven hours a month visiting the site, far longer than the less than half an hour spent on visits to Amazon or the average of two hours and 15 minutes on Google, America’s most popular web destination.The overall rate of divorce, however, appears to be unaffected by the advent of social networking. The most recent published data – from 2009 – shows the overall divorce rate declining, slightly more slowly than the shrinking percentage of Americans who get married every year.A spokesperson for Facebook said: “It’s ridiculous to suggest that Facebook leads to divorce. Whether you’re breaking up or just getting together, Facebook is just a way to communicate, like letters, phone calls and emails. Facebook doesn’t cause divorces, people do.”

Who needs to watch tv now, you can just watch what is happening on facebook to catch up on real (or virtual) goss.  No wonder the internet is becoming the place to go for entertainment & cable companies are slowly losing their stranglehold on customers.

‘Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash.’  Rita Mae Brown

However TheNumbersGuy on Wall Street Journal did a bit of investigating & found it all to be a bit of bs in his post Irreconcilable Claim: Facebook Causes 1 in 5 Divorces

In the past two weeks, the idea that the popular social-networking site plays a role in one in five divorces was reported by many news organizations. This wasn’t the first time that surprising number has surfaced—it has appeared in news reports periodically for the past year and a half.Some lawyers do say that they see Facebook and other social media playing a role in divorce these days, as people rediscover old flames online or strike up new relationships that lead them to stray from their marriage vows. But lawyers and marriage researchers say there isn’t much evidence to support the notion that social-networking sites actually cause marriages to sputter.In fact, both the marriage and divorce rate in the U.S. have declined as Internet usage has risen, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. An annual survey of U.K. matrimonial lawyers by the accounting and consulting firm Grant Thornton has found that during the Facebook era, infidelity’s role as the primary cause of around one-quarter of divorces has been stable. In an email, a Facebook spokesman called the notion that the site leads to divorce “ludicrous.”

Well I guess that’s also the thing about the internet stuff that goes viral does not necessarily have to be the truth, but only to capture the public’s imagination.

‘Divorce is a game played by lawyers.’   Cary Grant

In another post TheNumbersGuy was on track to investigating this misnomer in Divorcing Hype From Reality in Facebook Stats

Part of the reason is that it is hard to pinpoint a single reason or even a set of reasons for any marital split. “Two people are involved in the marriage, one can initiate legal divorce, but among the host of behavioral, financial, moral, social etc choices, pressures, trends, which of them cause any one divorce?” asked Elizabeth Marquardt, director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values in New York. “I suppose you could get various academics to argue their pet theories. My own take is a broad social one that most people who get divorced don’t have problems much different from most people who stay married. They choose divorce from misguided notions that it will simplify their life or won’t be a big deal for their kids so long as they do it the ‘right’ way.”Some researchers have asked divorcees why they divorced, and gotten conflicting results from men and women. Others have looked for factors that predict whether couples divorce. “There are many social, cultural, and behavioral predictors of divorce,” W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, wrote in an email.Other academics examine couples’ behavior, seeking clues that might predict marital dissolution. “I spend a lot of time videotaping young couples and quantifying the emotions and behaviors in their conversations, and then I build my predictive models around those interpersonal phenomena,” Bradbury said. The research takes time, both to collect and analyze the data, and to wait to see whether couples last. But the alternative, surveys asking people to identify why they split, strike him as incomplete. “It gets us into the ballpark, but we are still left looking for our particular seat,” Bradbury said. “Just like the beginning of a relationship, the ending unfolds in complex ways, and simple summaries (‘we did not communicate well’; ‘he was a workaholic’; ‘substance problems’) barely scratch the surface of what happened. I am trying to do some narrative/qualitative work to fill in these gaps.”

I couldn’t find a really funny video on divorce so thought I would share this hysterical vid with Aussie comedian Carl Barron about Aussie wild life amongst other other things.  Enjoy…

Related articles

• Troubling Statistic of the Day (thedailywh.at)
• Divorcing Hype From Reality in Facebook Stats (blogs.wsj.com)
• Facebook a top cause of relationship trouble, say US lawyers (guardian.co.uk)
• Facebook a top cause of relationship trouble, say US lawyers (alisonsgypt.wordpress.com)
• Facebook’s Link to Divorce: It’s Complicated (online.wsj.com)
• Reports Say Facebook May Cause Divorce??? (997now.radio.com)
• Survey: Facebook Responsible For One-Fifth Of All Divorces In US (socialtimes.com)
• IRRECONCILABLE FACEBOOK DIFFERENCES (Living; Social Media) (thepulsemagazine.com)
• Dayummmm…. New Study Shows 1 In 5 Divorces Caused By Facebook! (bossip.com)
• Facebook and divorce (geneveith.com)
• Reason For 1 In 5 Divorces In The US: Facebook (perezhilton.com)