Use Facebook, risk divorce

The Internet is, at its core, a communications tool. Unfortunately, that communication can often be of a type not helpful to staying in a loving relationship. Which must be why one British law firm is now citing Facebook in 20 percent of all divorce petitions.

Many people use Facebook for many different reasons. Some use it to keep in touch with friends and family, some use it to share pictures and some use it to play games on. Some, it would seem, even use it to get up to some extramarital activity. Which inevitably leads to divorce. Because partners are bound to find out.

According to The Telegraph, Divorce-Online, a law firm specializing in divorce, claims that one in five of the divorces it processes cites Facebook as the reason to irrevocably split with their partner.

Mark Keenan, Managing Director of the company, said:

I had heard from my staff that there were a lot of people saying they had found out things about their partners on Facebook and I decided to see how prevalent it was. I was really surprised to see 20 percent of all the petitions containing references to Facebook. The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to.

So, what does this mean?

The pessimistic view is that Facebook is somehow responsible for people cheating on their partners. This could be true in some cases, with old flames or new conquests being found through the social networking site and the inevitable happening.

However, it’s much more likely that Facebook just gives people another means of cheating, but one which leaves a very large trail of breadcrumbs for a suspecting partner to follow. And when they find the pot of shining evidence at the end of the trail, they file for divorce, and Facebook gets mentioned as being the sole reason.

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