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Facebook: Forget Connecting, In the UK, It's All About Divorce

by Amar Toor on December 22, 2009 at 03:27 PM

Besides helping "you connect and share with the people in your life," Facebook, apparently, helps you split up with them, too. That's at least what a recent report in The Telegraph suggests, citing the increasing number of divorce filings that implicate the social networking site. It seems that Facebook and its kin make cheating on spouses easier, more tempting, and, by the same token, more traceable. According to one U.K. law firm, one out of every five of its divorce cases cite Facebook as one of the driving forces behind the split. The incidents seem to run the gamut from the banal (a husband having an illicit online affair) to the outright ridiculous (a woman finding out that her marriage had ended after reading her husband's relationship status update).

We're not sure that there's really a whole lot of blame to put on Facebook in this case. Yeah, the site makes it easier to get in touch with old flames, and sure, it's the most prominent means of "networking" these days. But is it really all that different from getting caught with lipstick on your collar, or even with an SMS card full of naughty text messages? Besides, as the article says, the divorce rate in the U.K. has actually decreased over the past few years. There's no way to really isolate a pure "Facebook effect" one way or the other, so we'll just take a deep sigh, shrug our shoulders, and borrow a line from Facebook's script: "It's complicated." [From: The Telegraph]

Tags: divorce, facebook, relationships, top

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