Is Social Media Hurting Your Relationship?

In the whirlwind of wedding planning, it's easy to forget the man you love and the steps you're taking toward a life together. Remembering why you decided to marry and why you chose this partnership—believing it would bring you a deeper, closer, more caring love—is the greatest savior of companionship.

First, know what you want

Marriage can be defined as a bouquet of love grown in the soil of respect, containing colors, pleasant scents, diversity, and differences. For this very reason, neither love, nor respect, nor similarities, nor differences alone are enough to sustain a marriage. What we need is to know ourselves, define our wants and desires, and be open with our partner about our relational needs. It means making an effort to hear and understand them. Only such a dialogue can offer us more than love and what we truly need.

An individual who expresses themselves safely gives their partner the same space and gets the chance to know them closely. This makes both ourselves and the needs and expectations in our relationship mutually understandable. Opening up space for each other and feeling the inner freedom to express ourselves sincerely makes the needs of 'being heard and understood'—which couples struggle with the most—audible and comprehensible.

Don't ruin your own happiness for others

The definition of relationship, expectations from marriage, cultural understanding, and all other environmental factors that two people create in their minds may not be similar. When couples realize there are differences on these issues, questions like 'Am I not suitable for marriage?', 'Has the right time not come yet?', 'Who is the right person for me?', 'Is love alone enough for marriage?', 'What do I need?' start racing through their minds with anxious speed. However, the mistake here is not having gotten to know each other enough and not having conveyed what's in our minds to the other side. The definition of marriage, which can be influenced by many factors such as cultural and experiential factors, intergenerational stories under the influence of generations, societal myths, and the spirit of the times, deserves to be expressed very clearly between couples in terms of what it means for them.

Creating a space where all differences and difficulties can be talked about without moving away from dialogue and respect gives rise to the need for an inclusive and warm love language. At the very core of this need lies mutual love and willingness to communicate. Love is a productive, creative, dynamic, and emotional process, and we want to be companions to exalt and perpetuate these feelings. In our geography, culturally, we choose to crown these relationships with marriage and celebrations. But today, we have started to see these celebrations turn into wedding stories so important that they make couples forget being a couple, and so hectic that brides cannot hear their grooms.

The impact of social media on relationships

In relationships, it has begun to change the meaning of relational values such as being a couple, being a spouse, being a mother, being in love, getting married. Extravagant weddings, hectic celebrations that make brides forget their grooms, and the influence of social media significantly harm marriage. Research in this area says that the influence of social media affects couples negatively, paving the way for ending relationships due to reasons such as infidelity, jealousy, and lack of dialogue.

From another perspective, when working with couples, the therapy room shows us that relationships actually encounter this toxic social media influence early on and begin to live with the anxiety of carrying the 'ideal couple' fantasy they create in their minds into external reality. Couples who unknowingly serve this purpose begin to follow and live the unreal but ideal, currently.

Choose the real, not the virtual

Some social media tools have reached the power to shape our lives and encourage feelings of having, being better, living for others, and most sadly, living to tell. At this point, the question arises: 'How will couples and brides-to-be who are exposed to seeing hundreds of production weddings and relationships on their 'discover' page every day protect themselves from this virtual influence?' However, it is in our hands to separate ourselves from all these virtual influences and all the 'should be, imposed, and expected' phenomena, from what families, friends, and guests think.

Choosing to remember our own reality, our love, our warm relational world, being in close contact with our partner, turning to care instead of neglect, to ourselves instead of others, is perhaps the greatest gift life offers us for our peace. For this very reason, choosing the real and authentic instead of the virtual and constructed imposed by the modern world's perception, creating moments where we embrace ourselves and love, keeping close the awareness that reminds us what we want and expect, can be the greatest saviors for our relationship and happiness.

Source: mahmure