Impact of Social Media on Personal Relationships

Such trends have teed up the newly-dubbed Instagram soft launch – the art of carefully introducing your new relationship to your followers in a way that creates deliberate intrigue and shrinking reticence in equal measure. It’s seen in the addition of a hand outstretched across a dinner table in a story background or a second thick, coarse dressing gown in a post simply titled "spa day".

It’s this sort of example-led social interaction – the kind that never existed in any public form a decade ago – that now defines our relationships, coercing our insecurities and urges into a highly palatable format that, we tell ourselves, act as the complete opposite of what we’re portraying.

Since information and photo-sharing sites have become an inseparable part of our daily routine (and oftentimes, identity-presentation) several studies investigated the impact of these platforms on our lives including romantic relationships. The overall picture is to say quite ambivalent.

It seems that, in this regard, social media gives rise to at least as much discord as it does pleasure, even in the most trusting and safe of relationships. One of the first empirical studies investigating this question found that social networking services can trigger our deep-rooted fear of abandonment because of their special features: for example, the ability to see, but not access, Facebook groups.

This must be a huge reason for such high levels of anxiety in young people. It seems that social media companies want to blur the lines between our public and private lives. It has become very difficult for people to figure out how they straddle these arenas.