After more than 20 years of marriage and two children, the discovery of a little black book in her husband’s car shattered Sandra Lee’s world.
The address book belonged to another woman and led Lee to a string of women that her husband had been having affairs with across the small Maryland community where they had built a life, and as far away as California.
Suddenly the frequent business trips seemed less innocuous, and it occurred to her that the late nights on the computer might not be for work.
“It was a purposeful, malicious seeking out of other people to cheat on me with in chat rooms,” Lee said.
In the mid 1990’s, when Lee discovered her husband’s affairs, chat rooms were the day’s social media, but they required actually sitting at your computer. Today’s social media sites, like Facebook, are assessable almost anytime by almost anyone through mobile phone apps.
In July of this year, researchers from Boston University in collaboration with researchers in Chile published a study in the journal Computers and Human Behavior. The study uncovered a link between social media use, higher divorce rates and greater marital dissatisfaction.
Findings showed a 2.18 to 4.32 percent increase in the divorce rate in states with more widespread Facebook use. The study also found that individuals who did not use social media were over 11 percent more satisfied with their marriages than those who identified themselves as heavy social media users.
The study’s authors were careful to explain that these findings do not mean social media is causing divorces or dissatisfaction, and they encourage further research into the areas of social networking sites, human behavior and the role these sites play in daily life.
As a licensed professional counselor in Memphis, Ebony Bailey has worked with individuals and couples facing difficulties in their marriages. She has had clients complain specifically about Facebook causing problems in their marriages.
“I hear a lot from clients that I talk to that their partners are constantly on Facebook, and that whole trust factor starts to spur up into their relationship,” Bailey said.
She also said that these relationships typically have other underlying issues, and Facebook serves as the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.
In 2010, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers released the results of a survey of more than 1,500 family law attorneys. The results showed 81 percent of those attorneys reported an increase in the use of evidence found on social networking sites in the five years prior to the survey. In that same survey, 66 percent of attorneys cited Facebook as the most common source of online divorce evidence.
Family law attorney Johnny Rasberry said social networking sites frequently factor into his practice in Memphis.
In the cases of several clients, he has found spouses who have taken to social media, especially Facebook, to air their grievances or even make threats.
“You don’t have to name the person — it can be a vague reference,” Rasberry said. “If it can be connected to a specific person contextually, it can be prosecuted as any threat, the same way it would if you walked up to someone and threatened them.”
He’s also found that people get themselves into trouble not with what they post, but what others post about them on social media.
Jackie George knows first-hand how information posted on social networking sites by others can be harmful. When she and her now ex-husband separated in 2005, he and his new girlfriend took to MySpace in an attempt to tarnish George’s reputation.
“They were posting things that were complete lies, trying to make me look like the guilty party in the break-up,” she said.
George was pushed to file for divorce during her separation because of these social media attacks. Before the divorce was final, her husband came back and wanted to make it work.
“If it wasn’t for all the abuse I received through MySpace, I would have been willing to keep trying and work through the marriage with him,” said George. “It was just too much to overcome, that he would publicly humiliate me in that way.”
Online retaliations are something Lee has experienced also. After discovering her husband’s affairs, she began tracking a particular woman she knew he had a relationship with in online chat rooms and sought out the other woman’s other man.
“I caused him to break up with that woman,” Lee said. “It’s not something I’d ever do now, but back then my whole life had been wrapped up in this marriage and mothering and his betrayal just destroyed me for a while.”
Lee described the affair and the end of her marriage as leaving her “pretty much suicidal,” and feeling powerless.
“My whole life had been built around being the good wife and mother,” said Lee. “I had to reconstruct my whole spiritual belief system based on what I could create out of my own sense of reality, and that took a while.”
Eventually, Lee left her marriage behind one chilly day in Maryland and started fresh in sunny California. She earned her graduate degree from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2003 and became a licensed marriage and family therapist in 2006. She is currently a pre-doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the same institution.
“In a convoluted way, social media kick-started me out of a really dead-end relationship and life and opened me to a lot of new possibilities,” she said.
In her work at Ventura County Behavioral Health over the last several years, she has counseled economically disadvantaged families in the predominately Latino area.
“Social media is a topic of therapy that comes into my office with almost every family I see,” Lee said.
She explained that in therapy she talks to her clients about triangulation, where couples will avoid the real issue in a relationship and focus on another thing, and she has found that social networking often serves that purpose. Couples who have entered into a marriage or committed relationship without the appropriate skills can be especially vulnerable to the pratfalls of social networking sites.
"We're all looking for the magic other," said Lee. "There is no magic other — we are it ourselves."
Lee has found that most of her married clients feel overwhelmed by varying factors in their lives, like money or parenting issues, and use social networking sites like Facebook as a way to escape.
"If I'm feeling overwhelmed anyway and I'm in a relationship and I just don't have to the energy to really be totally present and deal with that relationship and I don't invest myself, then it's easier to just sink myself into some social media aspect."
It is Lee's opinion that when people are seeking to escape with social media and withdrawing from relationships, it opens a door for infidelity.
"People are seeking to escape with social media, so doesn't it make sense that they're really escaping any reality coming from the social media," she said.
“People fool themselves into thinking, ‘This is not me — it’s just a game, really.’ Then it becomes real if you go too far with it.”
She draws a comparison to the criminal mind in that many criminals must build up to the larger more violent acts.
"It's an easy way to just try out a little bit, then a little bit more," Lee said. "First you're chatting with someone. Now you're not just chatting, you're meeting them for coffee. Then you're meeting them in a hotel room, if it progresses that far."
Lee acknowledges that social media can be used in healthy ways, especially to keep husbands and wives connected when they may travel for business or have other reasons to be apart.
In 2008 when her husband was deployed for a year in Iraq, Megan Merritt's brother died unexpectedly. The 27-year-old Mississippi native followed the military protocol and contacted the Red Cross to get her husband Chris the message, but she also e-mailed him.
"He got my email before he even got his Red Cross message, so a lot of times it is faster for something like that," Merritt said.
She also used Facebook to send important messages and Skype so he could talk to their four children.
"It kept him updated with everything so when he got home he didn't feel like everything's completely changed," Merritt said. "The first time he saw Carly was on Skype. The first time he saw Macy Kate walk was on Skype, and the first time he heard her talk was on Skype," Merritt said.
She gave birth to Carly mid-way through Chris' deployment and Macy Kate was just eight months old when Chris deployed.
Merritt said it's a great thing that deployed service members have the opportunity to stay connected to their families through these methods now.
"They get to watch their kids grow up in pictures," she said. "It's sad, but it's true, and everything doesn't hit them quite as hard when they come home."
