The Social Relationship

by: Alexis Scharfenkamp

Professor Marci Swank

ENG 1005-05
Research Paper
5 November 2014

We all scroll through newsfeeds and timelines everyday silently judging our friends for
what they are posting on the internet. We do this without thinking because it is such a natural
thing for us to do, but have you ever taken a moment to think about why this is? Why can
something posted on the internet affect how we feel so much? Social media has drastically
evolved in the past few years, and it becomes more relevant every single day. Many people
spend hours and hours every day on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, and many
other social media websites. Social media can be something fun to scroll through in your free
time and used positively to spread important news, but just as quickly it can be used in a
damaging and toxic way. In this paper, I am going to be researching what social media is doing
to our romantic relationships. Should a Woman Crush Wednesday Instagram post be all that a
girl expects from her boyfriend, and does it matter that your significant other has ex-girlfriends
or ex-boyfriends on their Snapchat Best Friends? This paper is going to focus on the
significance of relationships and what social media is doing to our communication skills, envy,
use of diversions, and levels of satisfaction in our romantic relationships.
Before discussing how social media has changed romantic relationships, I am going to
discuss why romantic relationships are relevant. It is pretty well known that most people want to
be in relationships, but why? How important is it to be in a romantic relationship? According to
Robbins, we place a very high value on our romantic relationships because they make us happier
and healthier, and although it is hard to put an exact value on relationships it is obvious that they
are important, if you look. We spend so much of our time and efforts in pursuing relationships
because they give us a feeling of fulfillment. Robbins has done research among college students
and has found that many of them do not spend time dreaming about careers or vacations, but
about having significant others (21). There is something inside of us that just makes us happier

when we are close with others, so it makes sense that relationships would have such high
importance in our lives. It is painfully clear that romantic relationships are very important, but
what is it that makes relationships so important to both members? There are many variables that
vary from relationship to relationship. It is important that you evaluate what you would rank as
important as far as personality traits, morals, and relationship expectations go, and find someone
who places a high value on these things as well (75). While we can all agree on the fact that
relationships are important, the factors that make them important are very different relationship
to relationship, just as people vary.
It is clear that all throughout history relationships have been important for different
reasons, but throughout the years relationships themselves have stayed fairly similar; however, in
recent years, social media has put a twist on relationships as we previously knew them. As if
there are not enough things to worry about in the romance department, we now have to worry
about not only what we posting online, but what we see online and how we are reacting to it.
While often there is a negative connotation with social media and relationships, this is not always
the case. Seeing others in really good relationships can cause us to create impossibly high
standards. If you have ever been on a social media website, you know that posting goes two
ways: when something really good happens or when something really bad happens. We never
really see people or relationships when they are at status quo. No one has created a Pinterest
board entitled Average Dates. When our friends are constantly posting all the highs of their
relationships, it can lead to overly optimistic and impossibly high standards (Reizer and
Hetsroni). Obviously standards to some degree are essential, but there is a line where people can
become high maintenance and delusional. It is important that while we are seeing posts, we
evaluate the standards that are being created in our minds. Yes, it was a cute date, but how often

have you seen it posted? It does not happen all the time, and that is why it was posted on social
media websites in the first place.
The internet can cause us to raise our standards ridiculously high causing us to expect
more out of significant others, but social media triggers many other actions and emotions in
relationships. While it is true that social media and texting make it easier to communicate with
one another, it does not always make relationships better. In fact, according to The Huffington
Post, relationship strength often decreases if couples use more than five different means of
communicating (Borresen). It makes sense that after a certain point, there are too many forms of
communication. If you are constantly in communication with your significant other via social
media and texting, you are going to miss out on what is going on in the world around you. This
eventually leads to bitterness towards the person that is causing you to miss out on your life. It is
clear that you must be able to communicate with your significant other, but you also must be able
to live an independent life and be okay with not constantly being in connection. Its better for
both members of the relationship, and it will give you reason to actually be together in real life,
which is more satisfying in the long run (Nathan).
We know that communication is a necessity in all relationships, whether it is with your
family, best friends, or significant others. As humans, we struggle communicating effectively,
especially when it is a problem that we do not want to address. Many people already struggle
with jealousy, so it is logical that social media only intensifies this struggle. One of the biggest
contributors to envy in relationships caused by social media is Snapchat. Although liking profile
picture changes or retweeting an ex-girlfriend can cause fights, overall, Snapchat can be the most
detrimental to relationships. Snapchat is an app available on smartphones that allows people to
send pictures and videos lasting up to ten seconds long before they disappear from your phone

forever. Although they are unreachable by the sender and receiver, they do remain on the
internet; therefore, not truly disappearing for police officers and higher authority. Many people
believe that Snapchat was created to send nude photos, and that it is only used for destructive
purposes (Sweeny). This fact being well known as it is often creates conflict when ex-girlfriends
and boyfriends are found by new companions in the Best Friend section of Snapchat. The
Best Friend section on this app is a list of the three users that you most frequently send photos
to. Many do not understand how pictures that only last five seconds can cause fights among
young adults, but with envy off the charts as it is today, something that starts as an innocent
selfie can quickly turn into something very destructive to relationships (Blaine).
Although Snapchat is among the top jealousy triggers, it does not stop other sites from
being relevant to relationship problems, as well. Something as simple as Facebook interactions
can also cause trouble in what may seem like paradise. In one sample of college students, 67%
reported using Facebook to monitor a former romantic partner, and a smaller percentage of
students use Facebook to engage in more intense cyberstalking (Muise, Christofides, and
Desmarias). Creeping is something that occurs so frequently that we do not consider it
cyberstalking. We justify our cyberstalking because it is so easy. All it takes is one notification
that your boyfriend liked a profile picture change of his ex-girlfriend to lead to hours of looking
at every interaction and like between the two of them. When we cyberstalk others, especially
exes, it can cause overthinking and the creation of things that never happened. If we are looking
for something, we find it, even if it is not there because we are jealous by nature.
Our jealousy roots from not wanting to get hurt and to avoid letting people know the real
us, only to be hurt. Just as we are naturally jealous, we also try to block out hard emotions. If
something is going to be difficult to deal with or fix, we flee. We cannot stand the thought of

actually dealing with our feelings and emotions, so we use the internet and social media websites
as diversions. If we are constantly on social media, we are not forced to face how we actually
feel (Howerton). This obviously plays a role in relationships because they are built on a
foundation of feelings and emotions. We are all guilty of diversions. Whether it is drinking,
cleaning the house, or social media, we all have that one thing that we do a little too much as a
coping mechanism to avoid dealing with what we are feeling, we all use them. Diversions do not
have to be a bad thing if they are used in an effective way; however, if we spend all our time on
social media instead of facing our emotions, the sites are detrimental to our relationships. This
can be found more in Twitter than other social media sites. The newest trend in our generation is
sub-tweeting. This is when a user tweets something indirectly about someone else without
actually saying that it is about them. When people are upset and do not want to confront the
problem or the person, they often post things that they normally would not or know will be
hurtful. It is easy to post something on the internet from the comfort of your home. You do not
have to think about the repercussions or look anyone in the eye while you say it. It is an easy out
to facing problems and ten years ago we did not have this outlet available. It tends to blow things
out of proportion and leads to fixing problems via social media instead of face-to-face, which
tends to be ineffective.
Like I stated earlier in this paper, communication is a necessity in relationships. It needs
to be stressed that this communication needs to be direct. You cannot post an elusive statement
on the internet and expect your significant other to see it, know that it is about your relationship,
and have them make an effort to fix it. In my personal opinion, if you think that using social
media to solve personal problems is effective problem solving, you probably should not be in a
relationship. Although the problem may be solved, it will not have the same conflict resolution

that you would get by sitting down and having a conversation with your significant other. Not
only is it beneficial to relationships, but crucial to creating a healthy line of communication and
problem solving.
Having all these different forms of communication available can cause problems not
only in relationships because of over-communicating, but the ability to communicate with many
other people that we would not have had access to a few years ago. If for even an hour we are not
satisfied by our partners, we have many other outlets available to look for satisfaction from,
instead of our partners. You can pull up Facebook and message people around the globe, post a
picture of yourself on Instagram and try and find validation through likes, or you can subtweet
about the problems you and your significant other are having. The options are virtually endless.

Furthermore, for women, but not men, involved in romantic relationships, more internet use
was associated with less satisfaction with their relationships and less overall life satisfaction
(Peterson, Aye, and Wheeler). It is proven that the more outlets we have to other people and
distractions, the less satisfied we will be with what we have, and like I mentioned earlier, what
other people say they have is an exaggeration of the one good date that they have had this month.
It is not real because you can make yourself look like whoever you want to be on the internet.
We only have to post half of the truth and we can filter our pictures. No one is one hundred
percent themselves on their social media profiles.
After researching, it has become obvious that what we all need to do is set down the
smartphones, close the laptops, and communicate with each other face-to-face. It is proven that
our relationships thrive when we do. It is clear that relationships are crucial to who we are. They
can bring us happiness, which in turn makes us healthier human beings; however, in this day and
age, we have to be careful because social media is around every corner waiting for the

opportunity to tear us down. Social media is present everywhere we turn whether or not we
directly participate. The use of social media often causes problems in communication, a rise in
envy, use of diversions, and lower levels of satisfaction in our romantic relationships. Social
media users find less satisfaction in their relationships. When you first type social media and
relationships into the Google search bar, the automated follow up words include; problems
and breakups. This is a direct reflection of what social media is doing to our romantic
relationships. I think we all need to step back and evaluate the value we place on social media in
comparison to each other. The bottom line is we spend time on what we value the most, so we
are left to make a simple decision to value each other more than we value the internet.

Works Cited
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30 Oct. 2014.
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2014.
Howerton, Kristen. "Social Media- Sucking Time or Saving Lives." TedTalks. YouTube, 17 June
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Muise, Amy, Emily Christofides, and Serge Desmarias. "Creeping or Just Information
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