One law firm says as much as 20 percent of them have something to do with the social network

Dec 23, 2009 10:47 GMT  ·  By
One law firm in the UK says as much as 20 percent of divorce cases have something to do with Facebook
   One law firm in the UK says as much as 20 percent of divorce cases have something to do with Facebook

Social networking is billed as an extension of our real world social interactions and some say it's equally important. To an extent this is very true, but this isn't necessarily a good thing. While social networks made it easier to make friends or even get married, it's also making it easier to lose them as well or, as the case may be, get a divorce. In fact, it looks like as much as 20 percent of divorces in the UK can be linked to some Facebook funny business from one of the spouses, at least that's what The Telegraph is saying, more or less.

According to the report, social networks, like Facebook, are causing more and more people to be suspicious of their partners' activities and for good reason it seems, as the same social networks are facilitating extra-marital affairs even if they're the virtual kind. One law firm, talking to the Telegraph, which specializes divorce is claiming that 20 percent of all the cases they work with list some Facebook wrong-doing as at least part of the reason for the divorce.

It's mostly just flirty chats and things getting a bit more intense than they should that get most people upset, though most of the times these aren't linked to face-to-face meetings. Of course, in most cases Facebook is hardly the main reason for the break-up as well.

One in five does sound like an awful lot of cases, but this isn't exactly a statistical measurement, it's just one law firm doing some empiric analysis which hardly counts as accurate, no matter how many cases it handles. Yet, the fact is that social networking and the web in general is having a sometimes profound effect on human relationships. In the end though, nothing is really changing, people are doing everything they have since the dawn of civilization, they're just adapting to the new means.