Facebook a top cause of relationship trouble, say US lawyers



Social networking site becoming primary source of evidence in divorce proceedings and custody battles, lawyers say

Facebook

Photographs taken from social networking sites are a rich source of evidence, divorce lawyers say. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

When Facebook gets involved, relationships can quickly fall apart – as Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi have discovered. But dictatorships are not the only ties being dissolved by social networking sites: now Facebook is increasingly being blamed for undermining American marriages.

Even though the rate of divorce in the US has remained largely stable in recent years, American divorce lawyers and academics have joined Middle East analysts in picking out Facebook as a leading cause of relationship trouble, with American lawyers now demanding to see their clients' Facebook pages as a matter of course before the start of proceedings.

"We're coming across it more and more. One spouse connects online with someone they knew from school. The person is emotionally available and they start communicating through Facebook," said Dr Steven Kimmons, a clinical psychologist and marriage counsellor at Loyola University Medical Centre near Chicago.

Yet while the US media has been quick to trumpet any evidence of Facebook as the country's leading marriage-wrecker, the truth is "It's complicated," as the site's relationship status would have it.

A 2010 survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML) found that four out of five lawyers reported an increasing number of divorce cases citing evidence derived from social networking sites in the past five years, with Facebook being the market leader.

Two-thirds of the lawyers surveyed said that Facebook was the "primary source" of evidence in divorce proceedings, while MySpace with 15% and Twitter with 5% lagged far behind.

Those statistics included not just evidence of infidelity but other legal battles, such as child custody cases in which parents deny using illicit drugs but boast of smoking marijuana on their Facebook pages.

Photographs harvested from social networking sites – including those posted by friends or colleagues on their own pages – are a particularly rich source of damning evidence, according to divorce lawyers.

"This sort of evidence has gone from nothing to a large percentage of my cases coming in," Linda Lea Vicken, a member of the divorce lawyers' group from South Dakota, told the Associated Press.

Marlene Eskind Moses, president of the AAML, said the openness and sharing of social networking sites left their users' public and private lives more exposed.

"If you publicly post any contradictions to previously made statements and promises, an estranged spouse will certainly be one of the first people to notice and make use of that evidence," said Moses.

Statistics for January from online analysts Nielsen showed 135 million people in the US visiting Facebook during the month – nearly 70% of the country's internet users. On average, users spent more than seven hours a month visiting the site, far longer than the less than half an hour spent on visits to Amazon or the average of two hours and 15 minutes on Google, America's most popular web destination.

The overall rate of divorce, however, appears to be unaffected by the advent of social networking. The most recent published data – from 2009 – shows the overall divorce rate declining, slightly more slowly than the shrinking percentage of Americans who get married every year.

A spokesperson for Facebook said: "It's ridiculous to suggest that Facebook leads to divorce. Whether you're breaking up or just getting together, Facebook is just a way to communicate, like letters, phone calls and emails. Facebook doesn't cause divorces, people do."

But given its popularity, it is little wonder that negotiating "Facebook divorce" status updates has become another unhappy event for failed romances, over when to launch the site's broken-heart icon out into the glare of the world's news feed.


Irreconcilable Claim: Facebook Causes 1 in 5 Divorces

Upon further review, Facebook and marriage aren't incompatible.

In the past two weeks, the idea that the popular social-networking site plays a role in one in five divorces was reported by many news organizations. This wasn't the first time that surprising number has surfaced—it has appeared in news reports periodically for the past year and a half.

Some lawyers do say that they see Facebook and other social media playing a role in divorce these days, as people rediscover old flames online or strike up new relationships that lead them to stray from their marriage vows. But lawyers and marriage researchers say there isn't much evidence to support the notion that social-networking sites actually cause marriages to sputter.


In fact, both the marriage and divorce rate in the U.S. have declined as Internet usage has risen, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. An annual survey of U.K. matrimonial lawyers by the accounting and consulting firm Grant Thornton has found that during the Facebook era, infidelity's role as the primary cause of around one-quarter of divorces has been stable. In an email, a Facebook spokesman called the notion that the site leads to divorce "ludicrous."

Yet the 1-in-5 number has thrived in part because it helps fill a vacuum: There isn't much reliable research about what does cause divorce. Academic researchers don't even agree on how to approach the question. Some have searched for predictive demographic factors, such as age and income. Others have studied married couples' relationships to see which characteristics presage a split. Determining whether a couple is likely to break up, though, is different than identifying the actual cause.

Only a few studies have surveyed divorcees directly at the time of their divorce. One by two Pennsylvania State University researchers used as its data source 2,033 married people who had agreed to be tracked in 1980. By 1997, barely half were still reachable and amenable to interviews; of those, about one in five had gotten divorced and would discuss it. That left 208 people to be studied, a relatively small sample. And the rates of reported reasons differed between men and women. Some 9% of women ascribed their divorce to mental or physical abuse, while no men did; conversely, 9% of men said they didn't know the cause, while none of the women said this.

Even numbers on overall U.S. divorce rates are spotty. NCHS reclassified its divorce statistics as "provisional" in 1996, reflecting budgetary constraints at the agency that hampered data collection and the lack of reporting from California and a few other states that stopped tracking divorce. The figures for 2009, for example, exclude California and five other states that together contain 21% of the U.S. population.

In 2008 the Census Bureau began asking Americans in an annual survey whether they have been divorced in the last year, which is allowing researchers to start filling in gaps in state data. But so far there aren't enough data to identify trends.

"To do this kind of research requires a huge amount of persistence," says George Levinger, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts.

Still, the widespread circulation of the supposed Facebook divorce link shows how a catchy number can take on a life of its own.

The 1-in-5 number originated with an executive at an online divorce-service provider in the U.K. Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online, which allows Britons to file uncontested divorces at low cost, had just launched the company's Facebook page and wondered what role Facebook has in precipitating divorces. After determining that the word "Facebook" appeared in 989 of the company's 5,000 or so most recent divorce petitions, he had Divorce-Online issue a news release in December 2009 stating "Facebook is bad for your marriage."

Mr. Keenan acknowledges that his company's clients aren't necessarily representative of all divorces, and he adds that his firm never claimed that Facebook actually causes 20% of divorces. "It was a very unscientific survey," Mr. Keenan says.

A few months later, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers announced results of a survey of its 1,600 members, 81% of whom said they had seen an increase in cases using social-networking "evidence" in the last five years. These results weren't surprising, given Facebook's phenomenal growth. But the survey drew widespread coverage that often resuscitated the 1-in-5 divorce figure.

The confusion crested last week when Perry Drake, senior manager of media relations for Loyola University Health System in Chicago, put together a news release touting a Loyola psychologist's expertise on relationships and social media. Finding the 1-in-5 figure online, Mr. Drake led the news release with the headline: "Don't let your marriage be among the 1 in 5 destroyed by Facebook." By the time Mr. Drake became aware of the error and alerted the news release's recipients, news articles had appeared around the world.

"A little sloppiness on my part has made for a bad two weeks," says Mr. Drake.

Write to Carl Bialik at numbersguy@wsj.com