aepage.net

When I play World of Warcraft, and I’m on a long flightpath, I read the “shared” articles in my Google reader feed and read some really crazy stories. The one that’s really been bothering me is a Telegraph story
about how one in five divorces in the UK cite Facebook as the reason for their divorce. Divorce lawyers interviewed by the Telegraph said that the popularity of websites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace were “tempting spouses to cheat.” The most common citation in these divorces is that people were “having inappropriate sexual chats with people that they were not supposed to.”

A search for similar articles brought me to FacebookCheating.com a community dedicated to people talking about their stories about partners using Facebook as a way of cheating. I’m still unsure if the site is legitimate or not, but it is tapping into something that I think is happening to a number of people.

I have to confess that my interest in this topic is entirely personal.

In 2006, I had been in a relationship for a year, my first real “adult” relationship since college. That fall, our relationship began to deteriorate. I eventually became suspicious and logged into my boyfriend’s Facebook account while he was out of town. I found 900 messages from September 2007 to December 2007 between him and a girl I knew. In rereading them for this blog post, I think they had been talking as early as August.

She was in China and he was here in Atlanta, but a line was definitely crossed in those messages. After we broke up, I was messed up for almost a year, seeing a therapist to work through my depression.

Even though there was no physical act of cheating, he was “just trading messages online.” My feelings of hurt and betrayal were incredibly real. All of the articles and blogs that I read kept asking “is this cheating?” I would definitely say yes – if you have to hide something from your partner you’re doing something wrong.

Two years later, I am now engaged, in love with the best boyfriend on the planet and can look back at the relationship more objectively. I know that our relationship was deeply troubled and should have not lasted even that one year. Despite those troubles, I still cannot fathom the Facebook messages. The whole experience has made me more cautious with everyone, and saved me a lot of trouble with other people.

I was INCREDIBLY prickly with Mark, and am still embarrassed by how suspicious I was of him in the beginning. I was flat out rude at times, convinced that he was just another jerk.

This whole post really makes me think of my senior Bible teacher, Dr. Henderson. We were reading Finding the Love of Your Life and talking about our future marriages. Naturally, I was rolling my eyes because at seventeen, I hated men my own age and found them repulsive. Even though I scowled and ignored most of the class, like an idiot.

I do remember one piece of advice that Dr. Henderson gave us. We were talking about some random topic in class when he got sidetracked and stopped discussion for a moment, “The thing is that the person that you’re dating now, will become someone else’s partner one day. They will carry with them the experiences that they share with you into other relationships. Make sure that they’re experiences worth carrying, not something that will be a emotional burden to them, that will hurt for years to come.”

I still remember that conversation more clearly than anything else from senior year. I really wish that I had listened to Dr. Henderson and treated the people that I dated in my early twenties with more care. I really wish that someone had tried to teach that lesson to my old partners too.

If you have to hide it, it’s cheating and emotionally destructive to you both. You’ll leave your partner and move on, but someone else will have to pay the price for your actions later on. The emotional equivalent of a “dine and dash.”

Treat people kindly, some day they’ll belong to someone else.

Edit (for Kevin)

I realized that I failed to comment on whether or not I feel like Facebook ended my relationship. I don’t think Facebook ended our relationship – failure to communicate, lying and being a crappy couple ended our relationship. Facebook is a communication tool that allows people to talk to each other in new and pretty cool ways. It’s just a website, there is no good or bad to associate with it. The good or bad comes with how you choose to use it.

Popularity: 56% [?]

This entry was posted Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 10:19 am and is filed under Real Life. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.