...speaking of newspeople being behind the times:
Anyone see the recent Fox News report that Facebook is being blamed for starting affairs and destroying marriages? Gee, ya think?
And they make it sounds like breaking news...

link?

I found this: Muslim Clerics: Facebook Encourages Extramarital Affairs. It's from 2009

That's where my wife started hers.

mb, Fox hasn't been following things as closely as you've had to do for the past year.

I hope you & H are doing OK today.

Let me poke around and see if I can find one - I saw it on TV a few days ago...

Ain't that the truth!

We're hanging in there, learning more about each other every day, meeting needs and building protective walls. It's been pretty good.
I don't want to t/j my own thread Check out my thread about Histrionic Personality Disorder.

Same here

How much is Facebook to blame vs lack of boundaries?

100% failure to protect one's emotional needs from OP.

I don't know. Sites like FB can make communicating and getting together easier, but something about it reminds me of the idea that it's the gun's fault when someone gets shot. Removing FB from the universe isn't going to make people faithful.

That being said, if you use FB as any part of your affair, you forfeit your right to it, just like if you shoot someone you no longer get to carry a gun.

facebook CAN BE a lack of boundaries for many.

Facebook (and other social networking sites like Myspace) are for meeting and networking with other people.

If you are married, why would you meet and network with people without your spouse being part of that process? I think that a private FB or MS (or other such sites) account when you are married indicates that the boundaries are already gone.

Not many years ago, it was "chat rooms." Now it's FB. It's the secret second life that is the problem and that always indicates a lack of personal and marital boundaries. Could be on-line games, porn, chats, whatever comes down the pike next.

What starts as recreational time becomes RC becomes Conversation becomes Admiration becomes PMs becomes letting someone to whom you are not married meet your ENs in private without the knowledge or agreement of your spouse.

The bottom line is that if you are married, you don't need to know whatever happened to the girl or guy you had a crush on in high school. That person grew up. With any luck, so did you.

We reminisce about what once was, dream about might have been and destroy what could be. Then we justify it all as being reality when it was nothing but a fantasy all along.


[/rant]

Yep, another Facebook marriage fatality here. It's where I discovered a message to my WH from another woman that led to our separation two days later....

Okay I know that many of you are against Facebook. It is not a bad thing at all. I am on Facebook and have been for a few years. I don't have any previous bf's or crushes on my facebook, I didn't see the need. I turned off the chat part. I play a lot of the games on there.

I have friends from all over the world that I have reconnected with on Facebook. When I do reconnect with someone, I just state what I have been up to and ask them the same. Funny thing is I have 235 friends on there but probably only talk to 50 of them on a somewhat regular basis( a lot are young ones I work with). We send each other messages, but most of my time on facebook is spent playing the apps.

In Canada, we have a "dating site" called Ashley Madison. It is for married people to have affairs. It is truly disgusting. In Toronto, the TTC(public transit) wouldn't allow them to advertise with them. There was a court case about it and everything. I believe sites like these should be banned. But Facebook is harmless until and unless it is used by someone who has loose boundaries about it. I didn't hide a thing about my facebook account from my WH. He didn't hide his either(POSOW wasn't involved in his FB acct at all and he deactivated it afterwards).

I am for Facebook and marriage. I believe you can have both. It would be like me saying that men and women should be banned from working together because that is how my WH and POSOW met.

My husband and I are both on facebook along with my mother, his mother, aunts, uncles, all of our children and siblings, close marital friends, etc. We are both on each others pages every day and can see each others friends. We are friends with many people from MARRIAGE BUILDERS, too. I am not worried about this being a problem.

On the other hand, I know a FWW here who was in the same situation and she was seeing her former OM pop up on her friends pages. She immediately killed her page.

So this can be a danger to those who have had affairs, in that they can see their former OP. Even if that person is blocked, it only takes 2 seconds to unblock him!

I can answer that, for me at least. I joined Facebook because my MFA program started a group on there so that we could all stay in contact between residencies (it was a low-residency program, so we only saw each other on campus for 10 days every 6 months) and after graduation. It's an important networking opportunity for me because it allows me to stay in contact with my classmates and fellow writers. I only have a few local writer friends, so if it weren't for Facebook, I would lose a valuable opportunity to have a vast, widespread network of other writers. My H isn't really a part of that simply because he isn't a writer. Why would he want to network with people he has nothing in common with?

That being said, my H is my friend on Facebook. He knows my password. He can see anything I do on there any time he wants.

There are good uses for platforms such as Facebook. Just because some people use them to conduct A's doesn't make them evil. People use all sorts of mediums (email, phones, the workplace, etc.) to conduct A's. Does that make them inherently evil and bad?

I agree with this. I also can't help feeling (and I sincerely appologize to those who may be in this sitch) that people that blame FB for their affairs would have had their affairs the old fashioned way but were too stupid to do so. FB just makes it easier for them. It's still about boundaries - the internal boundaries, not the itemized list of prohibited activities - that prevents affairs.

There was no FB, and I didn't have myspace when I cheated. But I managed to be slimy enough to find other ways. Yes, slimy. People who cheat are - at least while they are wayward - slimy. Thanks to God, my DH, and supportive friends, I am not longer slimy. BUT I will never go anywhere alone with a male, have male buddies, text males, or any of that again. That was my mode of A. If my mode of A had been FB, then I would feel very differently - that would have to go too, at least unless H felt 100% fine with it.

H and I are known to write on each other's walls and even change each other's status (as a joke) because we have full on access to each other's pages. PORH and complete transparency should apply here too. NO SECRETS!!!

My friends (married couple) do this. On her page will pop up, "I'm so thankful to have a husband who is such a wonderful cook and so handsome too!" I'll think 'how sweet.'...then a few minutes later she will say, 'ok, dh hacked my account again...actually I just left my laptop open on the kitchen counter...but I do think he is a good cook and handsome!." I think it is hilarious. Makes me laugh everytime.

So different from the way my now XH acted about me getting a FB acount at the same time he did...he got furious...now I know it was because he wanted to carry on an affair...but he didn't need FB to do that. And it isn't FBs fault.