Is Facebook Bad for Your Marriage?

Geplaatst op 11-06-2025

A new study reports to find a link between Facebook use and how you feel about both your own life and the lives of others around you. The study of 425 college students found that those spending the most time on Facebook showed more signs of low self-esteem and reported feeling that other people led overall happier lives .

I take studies like this with a grain of salt. But there’s one thing I take with an even smaller grain of salt than studies about Facebook; people talking about their lives on Facebook, and marriage is no exception.

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As a social media connoisseur, I believe that all of the social media networks can play a helpful role in our lives. But escaping that “grass is greener” feeling on Facebook isn’t one of them. Why? Because just about everyone on Facebook is only going to show you pictures of green grass. In real life we are real people with real marriages with real ups and downs. On Facebook we can portray ourselves as perfect people with perfect marriages that live inside of fairytales.

As obvious as this seems, sometimes I find even the smartest among us measuring our own marriages against other people’s Facebook statuses. It’s a comparison that I believe is born of the idea that we’re actually seeing our friends and family and their lives on Facebook and not the representations of all those things that they chose to share.

The truth is,there is a certain level of fake built into social media that even the most “keeping-it-real” people can’t escape. Think about your profile picture. Did you just say eeny meeny miny moe and put up the first random photo of yourself that you saw? Probably not. Instead, you wanted your profile picture to say something about you, and chances are, you wanted it to say something good.

The same is true of everything else on Facebook. Just because I didn’t write a post about an argument with my husband doesn’t mean it didn’t happen anymore than the fact that because you only see pictures of me happy doesn’t mean that I’m never sad.

You are not seeing people’s lives on Facebook. You’re seeing people’s lives when company comes over. My house is always clean when I know I’m expecting guests, but it doesn’t mean that it’s never a mess, that’s just not what I choose to show people.

Today’s challenge is to take inventory of your Facebook activity and to be honest with yourself about how it’s affecting your own view of your life and your marriage. If you are constantly comparing your own marriage to the ones that you see online, remember that just like you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a marriage by a Facebook status. Judge your own marriage by what you know works for you and your spouse in real life, and not by what you see on the profile next door.