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Originally Posted by MikeWaters
older couple at church, husband left wife for a former flame connected on facebook. It reminds me of the adages I have read about from church authorities (I think one of them was a BYU commencement, which I found bizarre). "Don't connect with old flames on facebook" or some-such.
Of course, when you are a church authority you get exposed to a lot more of this. You know about affairs and divorces. Regular joe member like me doesn't usually hear about this stuff.
Is technology fundamentally different now? Did their use to be warnings about letters? Telegraphs? The telephone?
I've seen this with a friend's parents pre-social media. His mother left the marriage. It ended spectacularly badly. Without going into any details. Trust me.
One other observation: it seems by far the people most likely to get divorced from what I have observed among my facebook friends and acquaintances--less educated and less well-off white people.
A former prominent member of CG got divorced not long ago. Bunch of kids and all. He doesn't fit that category of being less educated and less well-off.
It just happens. We know that from statistics. Divorces happen.
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I know someone personally to whom this happened and facebook was the vehicle. A guy I used to work with -- LDS, educated, well-off financially thought he was just taking his family on vacation in Florida. Little did he know while he was with the kids at Disneyworld and thought his wife was at some scrapbooking convention that she was actually cheating on him with some guy she used to know and had reconnected with through facebook.
Now I'm not going to say this guy didn't have some quirks which even I could see, but that is still a pretty crappy thing to do to your spouse (and kids). And while it's true that it's not that technology is the real problem, I think the sudden rise of social media has led to a lot of people who didn't grow up with it doing things they probably wouldn't have done in "real" life. It has made people think it's somehow ok to act in certain ways because it's on the computer. It's not rational behavior necessarily.