The Importance Of Facebook And Relationships

Facebook and Relationships Since Facebook’s launch in February of 2004, the popular social-networking site now has over 500 million users around the world. As long as users have access to the internet, they can connect with family and friends at any given time, and even unite with people who have common interests via different Facebook pages. As Facebook continues to grow in popularity, it has also become a popular way for people to maintain and engage in their romantic relationships. In Marianna Dainton and Alexandra Stokes’s article, “College Students’ Romantic Relationships on Facebook,” these scholars use a uses and gratification perspective to establish connections between the use of Facebook for relationship maintenance and jealousy;

Whether it is in real life, or on Facebook, partners use both positive and negative relationship maintenance behaviors to sustain a satisfying relationship. Positive maintenance behaviors include; positivity, openess, assurances, sharing tasks, and social networks. For example, Tom and Mary have been dating for several months and Tom decides he needs to use more openness in order to maintain their healthy relationship. When Tom and Mary are talking at dinner, Tom reveals that his parents are getting a divorce and he is upset about it. By sharing these private thoughts to Mary, she feels that they have become closer. On the other hand, partners also use negative relationship maintence behaviors such as jealousy induction, avoidance, spying, infidelity, destrcutive conflict, and allowing control. To prove the claim that people use Facebook to maintain relationships, Dainton and Stokes use research from multiple scholars to narrow down relationship maintenance behaviors, and develop their first hypothesis connecting these behaviors to Facebook. This hypothesis claims that individuals who use Facebook for relationship maintenance will “enact more Facebook assurances, positivty, openness, and online monitoring,” compared to inidividuals who do not use Facebook for

The authors define different types of jealousy in order for the audience to understand the signifacance of jealousy in every day relationships. Among these types of jealousy are; cognitive (suspicious thoughts as a result from a threat), emotional (feelings of anger, fear, and insecurity that result from a threat), and trait jealousy (the extent to which people demonstrate jealousy across different situations). All of these jealousy types can result from looking at a partner’s Facebook, making them fall under the defintion of Facebook jealousy- feelings of jealousy associated with reviewing a partner’s Facebook. The author’s note that using Facebook to maintain relationships, and jealously resulting from Facebook may seem like two opposing variables, however, they explain that once a partner experiences jealousy from Facebook, they can use different jealousy-related goals in order to maintain their relationship. For example, one jealousy-related goal would be uncertainty reduction about a rival relationship. Therefore, if Tom saw Mary “like” someone else’s photo on Facebook, he would experience Facebook jealousy, but could then use this to talk to Mary and find out the state of their