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Why Love Island Needs Mingers - The Russell Howard Hour

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An Austrian Artist Was Sentenced to Jail for His Provocative Illustrations, But He Didn’t Give Up Drawing the Truth

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When Tinder became available to all smartphone users in 2013, it ushered in a new era in the history of romance.

On the 20th anniversary of The New York Times ' popular Vows column, a weekly feature on notable weddings and engagements launched in 1992, its longtime editor that Vows was meant to be more than just a news notice about society events. It aimed to give readers the backstory on marrying couples and, in the meantime, to explore how romance was changing with the times. "Twenty years ago, as now, most couples told us they'd met through their friends or family, or in college," wrote the editor, Bob Woletz, in 2012. "For a period that ran into the late 1990s, a number said, often sheepishly, that they had met through personal advertisements."

But in 2018, seven of the 53 couples profiled in the Vows column met on dating apps. And in the Times' more populous Wedding Announcements section, 93 out of some 1,000 couples profiled this year met on dating apps-Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Coffee Meets Bagel, Happn, and other specialized dating apps designed for smaller communities, like JSwipe for Jewish singles and MuzMatch for Muslims. The year before, 71 couples whose weddings were announced by the Times met on dating apps.

Matt Lundquist, a couples therapist based in Manhattan, says he's started taking on a less excited or expectant tone when he asks young couples and recently formed couples how they met. "Because a few of them will say to me, 'Uhhh, we met on Tinder'-like, 'Where else do you think we would have met?'" Plus, he adds, it's never a good start to therapy when a patient thinks the therapist is behind the times or uncool.

Dating apps originated in the gay community; Grindr and Scruff, which helped single men link up by searching for other active users within a specific geographic radius, launched in 2009 and 2010, respectively. With the launch of Tinder in 2012, iPhone-owning people of all sexualities could start looking for love, or sex, or casual dating, and it quickly became the most popular dating app on the market. But the gigantic shift in dating culture really started to take hold the following year, when Tinder expanded to Android phones, then to more than 70 percent of smartphones worldwide. Shortly thereafter, many more dating apps came online.

There's been plenty of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over how Tinder could reinvent dating: Maybe it would transform the dating scene into an endless virtual marketplace where singles could shop for each other (like an Amazon for human companionship), or perhaps it would turn dating into a minimal-effort, transactional pursuit of on-demand hookups (like an Uber for sex). But the reality of dating in the age of apps is a little more nuanced than that. The relationship economy has certainly changed in terms of how humans find and court their potential partners, but what people are looking for is largely the same as it ever was: companionship and/or sexual satisfaction. Meanwhile, the underlying challenges-the loneliness, the boredom, the roller coaster of hope and disappointment-of being "single and looking," or single and looking for something, haven't gone away. They've simply changed shape.

Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, two of Tinder's founders, have said in interviews that the inspiration for Tinder came from their own general dissatisfaction with the lack of dating opportunities that arose naturally-or, as Rad once put it jokingly, "Justin needed help meeting people because he had, what's that disorder you have where you don't leave the house?"

Tinder has indeed helped people meet other people-it has expanded the reach of singles' social networks, facilitating interactions between people who might never have crossed paths otherwise. The 30-year-old Jess Flores of Virginia Beach got married to her first and only Tinder date this past October, and she says they likely would have never met if it weren't for the app.

For starters, Flores says, the guys she usually went for back in 2014 were what she describes as "sleeve-tattoo" types. Her now-husband Mike, though, was "clean cut, no tattoos. Completely opposite of what I would usually go for." She decided to take a chance on him after she'd laughed at a funny line in his Tinder bio. (Today, she can no longer remember what it was.)

Plus, Mike lived in the next town over. He wasn't that far away, "but I didn't go where he lived to hang out, so I didn't really mix and mingle with people in other cities," she says. But after a few weeks of chatting on the app and one failed attempt at meeting up, they ended up on a first date at a local minor-league baseball game, drinking beer and eating hot dogs in the stands.

For Flores and her husband, having access to a bigger pool of fellow single people was a great development. In her first few years out of college, before she met Mike, "I was in the same work routine, around the same people, all the time," Flores says, and she wasn't exactly eager to start up a romance with any of them. But then there was Tinder, and then there was Mike.

An expanded radius of potential mates can be a great thing if you're looking to date or hook up with a broad variety of people who are different from you, says Madeleine Fugère, a professor of psychology at Eastern Connecticut State University who specializes in attraction and romantic relationships. "Normally, if you met someone at school or at work, you would probably already have a lot in common with that person," Fugere says. "Whereas if you're meeting someone purely based on geographic location, there's definitely a greater chance that they would be different from you in some way."

But there's also a downside to dating beyond one's natural social environment. "People who are not very similar to their romantic partners end up at a greater risk for breaking up or for divorce," she says. Indeed, some daters bemoan the fact that meeting on the apps means dating in a sort of context vacuum. Friends, co-workers, classmates, and/or relatives don't show up to flesh out the complete picture of who a person is until further on in the timeline of a relationship-it's unlikely that someone would introduce a blind date to friends right away. In the "old model" of dating, by contrast, the circumstances under which two people met organically could provide at least some measure of common ground between them.

Some also believe that the relative anonymity of dating apps-that is, the social disconnect between most people who match on them-has also made the dating landscape a ruder, flakier, crueler place. For example, says Lundquist, the couples therapist, if you go on a date with your cousin's roommate, the roommate has some incentive to not be a jerk to you. But with apps, "You're meeting somebody you probably don't know and probably don't have any connections with at a bar on 39th Street. That's kind of weird, and there's a greater opportunity for people to be ridiculous, to be not nice."

Many of the stories of bad behavior Lundquist hears from his patients take place in real life, at bars and restaurants. "I think it's become more ordinary to stand each other up," he says, and he's had many patients ("men and women, though more women among straight folks") recount to him stories that end with something along the lines of, "Oh my God, I got to the bar and he sat down and said, 'Oh. You don't look like what I thought you looked like,' and walked away."

But other users complain of rudeness even in early text interactions on the app. Some of that nastiness could be chalked up to dating apps' dependence on remote, digital communication; the classic "unsolicited dick pic sent to an unsuspecting match" scenario, for example. Or tirade of insults from a match who's been rebuffed, as Anna Xiques, a 33-year-old advertising copywriter based in Miami, experienced. In an essay on Medium in 2016 (cleverly titled "To the One That Got Away on Bumble"), she chronicled the time she frankly told a Bumble match she'd been chatting with that she wasn't feeling it, only to be promptly called a cunt and told she "wasn't even pretty." (Bumble, launched in 2014 with the former Tinder executive Whitney Wolfe Herd at its helm, markets itself as a more women-friendly dating app because of its unique feature designed to curb unwanted messages: In heterosexual matches, the woman has to initiate chatting.)

Sometimes this is just how things go on dating apps, Xiques says. She's been using them off and on for the past few years for dates and hookups, even though she estimates that the messages she receives have about a 50-50 ratio of mean or gross to not mean or gross. She's only experienced this kind of creepy or hurtful behavior when she's dating through apps, not when dating people she's met in real-life social settings. "Because, obviously, they're hiding behind the technology, right? You don't have to actually face the person," she says.

Perhaps the quotidian cruelty of app dating exists because it's relatively impersonal compared with setting up dates in real life. "More and more people relate to this as a volume operation," says Lundquist, the couples therapist. Time and resources are limited, while matches, at least in theory, are not. Lundquist mentions what he calls the "classic" scenario in which someone is on a Tinder date, then goes to the bathroom and talks to three other people on Tinder. "So there's a willingness to move on more quickly," he says, "but not necessarily a commensurate increase in skill at kindness."

Holly Wood, who wrote her Harvard sociology dissertation last year on singles' behaviors on dating sites and dating apps, heard a lot of these ugly stories too. And after speaking to more than 100 straight-identifying, college-educated men and women in San Francisco about their experiences on dating apps, she firmly believes that if dating apps didn't exist, these casual acts of unkindness in dating would be far less common. But Wood's theory is that people are meaner because they feel like they're interacting with a stranger, and she partly blames the short and sweet bios encouraged on the apps.

"OkCupid," she remembers, "invited walls of text. And that, for me, was really important. I'm one of those people who wants to feel like I have a sense of who you are before we go on a first date. Then Tinder"-which has a 500-character limit for bios-"happened, and the shallowness in the profile was encouraged."

Wood also found that for some respondents (especially male respondents), apps had effectively replaced dating; in other words, the time other generations of singles might have spent going on dates, these singles spent swiping. Many of the men she talked to, Wood says, "were saying, 'I'm putting so much work into dating and I'm not getting any results.'" When she asked what exactly they were doing, they said, "I'm on Tinder for hours every day."

"We pretend that's dating because it looks like dating and says it's dating," Wood says.

Wood's academic work on dating apps is, it's worth mentioning, something of a rarity in the broader research landscape. One big challenge of knowing how dating apps have affected dating behaviors, and in writing a story like this one, is that most of these apps have only been around for half a decade-hardly long enough for well-designed, relevant longitudinal studies to even be funded, let alone conducted.

Of course, even the absence of hard data hasn't stopped dating experts-both people who study it and people who do a lot of it-from theorizing. There's a popular suspicion, for example, that Tinder and other dating apps might make people pickier or more reluctant to settle on a single monogamous partner, a theory that the comedian Aziz Ansari spends a lot of time on in his 2015 book, Modern Romance, written with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg.

Eli Finkel, however, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage, rejects that notion. "Very smart people have expressed concern that having such easy access makes us commitment-phobic," he says, "but I'm not actually that worried about it." Research has shown that people who find a partner they're really into quickly become less interested in alternatives, and Finkel is fond of a sentiment expressed in a 1997 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper on the subject: "Even if the grass is greener elsewhere, happy gardeners may not notice."

Like the anthropologist Helen Fisher, Finkel believes that dating apps haven't changed happy relationships much-but he does think they've lowered the threshold of when to leave an unhappy one. In the past, there was a step in which you'd have to go to the trouble of "getting dolled up and going to a bar," Finkel says, and you'd have to look at yourself and say, "What am I doing right now? I'm going out to meet a guy. I'm going out to meet a girl," even though you were in a relationship already. Now, he says, "you can just tinker around, just for a sort of a goof; swipe a little just 'cause it's fun and playful. And then it's like, oh-[suddenly] you're on a date."

The other subtle ways in which people believe dating is different now that Tinder is a thing are, quite frankly, innumerable. Some believe that dating apps' visual-heavy format encourages people to choose their partners more superficially ( and with racial or sexual stereotypes in mind); others argue that humans choose their partners with physical attraction in mind even without the help of Tinder. There are equally compelling arguments that dating apps have made dating both more awkward and less awkward by allowing matches to get to know each other remotely before they ever meet face-to-face-which can in some cases create a weird, sometimes tense first few minutes of a first date.

And for some singles in the LGBTQ community, dating apps like Tinder and Bumble have been a small miracle. They can help users locate other LGBTQ singles in an area where it might otherwise be hard to know-and their explicit spelling-out of what gender or genders a user is interested in can mean fewer awkward initial interactions. Other LGBTQ users, however, say they've had better luck finding dates or hookups on dating apps other than Tinder, or even on social media. "Twitter in the gay community is kind of like a dating app now. Tinder doesn't do too well," says Riley Rivera Moore, a 21-year-old based in Austin. Riley's wife Niki, 23, says that when she was on Tinder, a good portion of her potential matches who were women were "a couple, and the woman had created the Tinder profile because they were looking for a 'unicorn,' or a third person." That said, the recently married Rivera Moores met on Tinder.

But perhaps the most consequential change to dating has been in where and how dates get initiated-and where and how they don't.

When Ingram Hodges, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, goes to a party, he goes there expecting only to hang out with friends. It'd be a pleasant surprise, he says, if he happened to talk to a cute girl there and ask her to hang out. "It wouldn't be an abnormal thing to do," he says, "but it's just not as common. When it does happen, people are surprised, taken aback."

I pointed out to Hodges that when I was a freshman in college-all of 10 years ago-meeting cute people to go on a date with or to hook up with was the point of going to parties. But being 18, Hodges is relatively new to both Tinder and dating in general; the only dating he's known has been in a post-Tinder world. When Hodges is in the mood to flirt or go on a date, he turns to Tinder (or Bumble, which he jokingly calls "classy Tinder"), where sometimes he finds that other UT students' profiles include instructions like "If I know you from school, don't swipe right on me."

Hodges knows that there was a time, way back in the day, when people mostly met through school, or work, or friends, or family. But for people his age, Hodges says, "dating has become isolated from the rest of social life."

Hailey, a financial-services professional in Boston (who asked to only be identified by her first name because her last name is a unique one and she'd prefer to not be recognizable in work contexts), is considerably older than Hodges, but even at 34, she sees the same phenomenon in action. She and her boyfriend met on Tinder in 2014, and they soon discovered that they lived in the same neighborhood. Before long, they realized that they'd probably even seen each other around before they met.

Still, she says, "we would have never interacted had it not been for Tinder. He's not going out all the time. I'm not going out all the time. The reality is, if he is out at a bar, he's hanging with his friends.

"And he's not gonna be like, 'Hey, how's it going?' as we're both getting milk or something at the grocery store," she adds. "I don't see that happening at all anymore."

The Atlantic's Kate Julian found something similar in her recent story on why today's young people are having less sex than prior generations:

Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore ... But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. "Miranda meets Steve at a bar," she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg effect when it comes to Tinder and the disentanglement of dating from the rest of social life. It's possible, certainly, that dating apps have erected walls between the search for potential partners and the normal routines of work and community. But it's also possible that dating apps thrive in this particular moment in history because people have stopped looking for potential partners while they go about their work and community routines.

Finkel, for one, believes that the new boundaries between romance and other forms of social interaction have their benefits-especially in a time when what constitutes sexual harassment, especially in the workplace, is being renegotiated. "People used to meet people at work, but my God, it doesn't seem like the best idea to do that right now," Finkel says. "For better or worse, people are setting up firmer boundaries between the personal and the professional. And we're figuring all that stuff out, but it's kind of a tumultuous time." Meanwhile, he says, dating apps offer separate environments where finding dates or sex is the point.

But, naturally, with the compartmentalization of dating comes the notion that if you want to be dating, you have to be active on the apps. And that can make the whole process of finding a partner, which essentially boils down to semi-blind date after semi-blind date, feel like a chore or a dystopian game show. As my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2016,

Now that the shine of novelty has worn off these apps, they aren't fun or exciting anymore. They've become a normalized part of dating. There's a sense that if you're single, and you don't want to be, you need to do something to change that. If you just sit on your butt and wait to see if life delivers you love, then you have no right to complain.

Hailey has heard her friends complain that dating now feels like a second, after-hours job; Twitter is rife with sentiments . It's not uncommon nowadays to hear singles say wistfully that they'd just like to .

Of course, it's quite possible that this is a new problem created by the solving of an old one.

A decade ago, the complaint that Lundquist, the couples therapist, heard most often was, "Boy, I just don't meet any interesting people." Now, he says, "it's more like, 'Oh, God, I meet all these not-interesting people.'"

"It's cliche to say, but it's a numbers game," Lundquist adds. "So the assumption is, the odds are pretty good that [any given date] will suck, but, you know. Whatever. You've gotta do it."

Finkel, for his part, puts it a little more bluntly. To him, there's one thing that all these wistful romantics, longing for the days of yore when people met in real life, are missing: that Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge-like eHarmony, OkCupid, and Match.com before them-exist because meeting in real life is really hard.

"I'm not saying that it's not a hassle to go on bad dates. It is a nuisance. You could be hanging out with your friends, you could be sleeping, you could be reading a book," he says. But, Finkel adds, singletons of generations past would "break out the world's smallest violin" for young people who complain about Tinder dates becoming a chore.

"It's like, Ugh so many dates, and they're just not that interesting," Finkel adds with a laugh. "It used to be hard to find someone to date!"

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When Tinder became available to all smartphone users in 2013, it ushered in a new era in the history of romance.

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Some people look back fondly on dating, generations ago, with romantic ideas of greater morality and better values. Others think that with all of the online apps and matchmaking websites we have today, it's never been easier to play the field.

But each era of dating in the past century was not without its pros, its cons, and its own set of unspoken rules. From the turn of the 20th century, to the present day, romantic relationships have been an evolving part of culture, just like everything else.

Dating becomes a thing

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The concept of dating really began at the turn of the 20th century. Prior to the late early 1900s, courtship was a much more private, unemotional affair. Women would meet with several men, with her parents present, to whittle the pickings down to the most suitable match for marriage, which heavily relied on factors such as financial and social status. When a young woman decided on a man she wanted to see exclusively, their activities as a couple took place either in the household, or at social gatherings. At that time, there was no such thing as just two young lovers "going out on a date."

However, this began to change in the early years of the 20th century, when couples began to go out together in public and unsupervised. Still, the ultimate and very apparent goal was still that of marriage. This stands in stark contrast to today's dating world, when the topic of marriage may not be brought up for several years.

The gentleman caller

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The first decade of the 20th century was marked by the figure of the gentleman caller. If a young man was interested in a young woman, he would follow the proper protocol of calling upon her, which meant that he would come to the family's home and (hopefully) be welcomed into their parlor. If he was invited back for subsequent visits, he would be free to come and call upon the young woman during hours specified by her parents.

As the years rolled on into the 1920s, however, this system quickly became outdated and unfavorable. Author Beth L. Bailey writes in her book From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth Century America, "Dating had almost completely replaced the old system of calling by the mid-1920s - and, in so doing, had transformed American courtship." This was a period of time when couples started going out on dates, which also meant they started paying for dates. This changed the relationship dynamic between a young man and a young woman, as now it was the man's duty to pay for the date, whereas before it was the woman who decided the terms of the visit.

Courtship vs. dating

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The fundamental difference between courtship and dating is that of freedom. While traditional courtship had its own set of rules and rituals, dating, as it evolved, became less structured. Courtship was seen as a fundamental part of a well-functioning society. When people started dating, relationships became less restricted and more personal.

So what instigated this cultural shift? In Jodi O'Brien's book, Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, Volume I, she writes, "Different institutions were becoming more prominent in the lives of young men and women, such as school, college, and workplaces, which exposed them to a large pool of potential dating partners. As a result, the purpose of dating was primarily to have fun, not to find a marriage partner. However, couples would form after several dates if they were interested in having more exclusive relationships." This starts to resemble what we would now conceive of as modern dating, and the ritual of courtship was left in the dust.

A proper match vs. falling in love

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With the introduction of dating also came the focus on falling in love, rather than finding a society-approved match. In previous years, love was not seen as being of central importance to a marriage, and if it was to come it would emerge after the wedding had already occurred. But with the introduction of dating came an increased desire for romance and love before deciding to commit to marriage.

This concept, explained in depth in The Oxford Companion to United States History, goes, "By the early nineteenth century, couples began to consider romantic love prerequisite for marriage and based their unions on companionship. The era's fiction frequently drew on love themes, while articles, essays, and public orations stressed mutual respect, reciprocity, and romance as ingredients of good marriages. Young courting couples chose their own partners, and their letters focused on romance rather than on the practical matters that had dominated the correspondence of earlier generations." The desire to climb the social ladder or to secure one's place in society fell by the wayside, and the desire to find a favorable longterm partner took its place.

Going steady

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In the 1950s, "going steady" was the term for being in an exclusive relationship. This status was about the relationship, sure, but it was also about standing out amongst your peers. According to the University of California, Santa Barbara, "Across university campuses, couples publicized their decision to 'go steady' when the man gave the woman an article of his clothing to wear, such as a jacket, sweater, or ring." Dating had become much more about youth culture than about family expectations.

The way in which two people experienced sexuality when dating also shifted. In the earlier part of the 20th century, sex and sexuality were not openly discussed. As author Jodi O'Brien put it, "Sex was desexualized" and reserved for marriage, when the couple had entered into a spiritual union with God. As dating gradually became more about personal pleasure throughout the decades, the expression of sexuality became much more commonplace.

According to the Oxford Companion to United States History, "The terms 'necking' and 'petting' - the former referring to kisses and caresses above the neck, the latter to the same below it - entered public discussion, giving names to previously unspoken private activities." Now when we think of the '50s, we tend to think of a period of purity and the Stepford Wife ideal, but in actuality, it was a time of sexual change that ended up resulting in a dramatic increase in population.

Free love

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Between the popularization of rock 'n' roll, and protesting the Vietnam War, 1960s youth culture was hot for revolution. Not only was it the activities of the US government that young people were resisting, but they were shirking old social conventions as well. If the '50s saw young people starting to experiment with sex, the '60s was the resulting explosion of sexual activity in the name of freedom.

For a long time, sex was either not discussed or seen as a kind of enemy - a destroyer of young girl's reputations. But this stopped being the case with the hippie generation. America in the 1960s author Edmund Lindop describes the sexual shift of the period, "For youth of the 1960s, such restrictions were a thing of the past. Many young women took birth control pills to prevent pregnancy. They freely explored their sexual feelings. Sex before marriage was no longer taboo. Young people extolled the benefits of "free love"- that is, making love without marriage or long-term commitments."

There were no rules for dating anymore. Young people did what they wanted, when they wanted, and modern-day "hook up" culture began.

Dating and tech

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The next major change in dating started with the introduction of matchmaking services and the internet. But the concept of online dating was being worked out way before the general public even had access to the internet. In 1965, two Harvard students created what is known as "Operation Match" to make dating easier for young people.

The "World Wide Web" officially became available to everyone in 1991, and online dating websites were soon popping up all over the place: Match.com was officially founded in 1995. And it was at the turn of the 21st century that people also began using Craigslist as a way of linking up with other people romantically. Shortly after, sites like OKCupid followed.

Millennial dating

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In 2017, you can't turn your head without finding someone who has at least one dating app on their phone: Tinder, Plenty of Fish, and Bumble, to name a few. While some people think this approach to dating really works, others collectively sigh at the thought of the current dating game. So why are so many millennials complaining that dating nowadays is just too frustrating and complicated, when technology was supposed to make it easier?

The individual has become more and more important in today's culture than ever before, and technology has played a big role in that. Just think of the concept of the selfie. This generation is much more focused on themselves than previous generations. Combined with the casual culture of hooking up, one night stands, and friends with benefits, actually finding someone to seriously date can be difficult. Millennials simply have so many options that "going steady" can be a hard pitch to sell.

Is dating getting worse or better?

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There is a case for both sides of this argument. Nowadays, we have more freedom to choose how we live our lives. We make up our own rules (or lack thereof) and are allowed so many options in how we wish to interact with romantic partners.

However, this is exactly what makes dating in 2017 so difficult. What does the other person want? Are they looking for something real or are they just trying to have fun? Are there any mind games going on here? Today's dating world is certainly a maze, but that doesn't mean that love doesn't still happen. Whether you meet on Tinder, or you meet at a bar, you can end up finding "the one."

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How dating has changed over the last 100 years

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Shutterstock Some people look back fondly on dating, generations ago, with romantic ideas of greater morality and better values. Others think that with all of the online apps and matchmaking websites we have today, it's never been easier to play the field.

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Social media has been linked to higher levels of loneliness, envy, anxiety, depression, narcissism and decreased social skills. As a Behavioral Scientist, I wonder what causes this paradox? The narratives we share and portray on social media are all positive and celebratory. It's a hybridized digital version of "Keeping up with the Joneses". Meaning for some, sometimes it appears everyone you know are in great relationships, taking 5-star vacations and living your dream life.

However, what is shared only broadcasts the positive aspects of our lives- the highlight reels.

Since we're only getting people's highlight reels and comparing it to ourselves, it is natural to have reactions to what we're watching. How does this impact relationships, dating, and our love lives? I conducted in-depth interviews with men and women, ranging from ages 28-73, that are active social media users and found that:

60% of people using social media reported that it has impacted their self-esteem in a negative way

50% reported social media having negative effects on their relationship

80% reported that is easier to deceive others through their social posting

Paradox Effect
It seems that social media is creating a paradox effect: giving off the illusion of many choices while making it harder to find viable options. Can it be that our highly connected world has now become disconnected? Posting dinners, selfies and vacay photos over human interaction for some is interaction. That IS their interaction. The paradox effect in dating is creating the illusion of having more social engagement, social capital, and popularity, but masking one's true persona. Since some are interfacing digitally more than physically it is much easier to emotionally manipulate others because they are reliant on what I call "Vanity Validation". The one you portray on your networks and the true you, for some, creates a double consciousness. Your lauded self on social media is constantly seeking more validation through electronic likes, not life.
Vanity Validation
In the latest Match Singles in America study's findings on how social media has impacted people's dating lives, they found that 57% of singles say social media has generated a Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). In my study, 50% reported feeling FOMO when comparing themselves to others on social media, while 60% of millennials reported feeling FOMO. Are we comparing ourselves to other people's highlight reels? Are we creating a false reality? It seems that we're only willing to share things that get positive reinforcement. If we're living through only focusing on the highlight reels, how do we express the negative side of our lives?

If you're comparing yourself to someone else's profile, aren't you discounting yourself? Anything that we share on our streams are things that we're either excited about or creating some popularity for yourself. Are we supposed to applaud that you eat? Are we supposed to applaud that you are out? Are we supposed to applaud the 100th seflie you took while you were out? Are we beginning to learn to relate to people for immediate gratification only?

Won't this impact our dating behaviors? If we only broadcast the "look at me", are we able to deal with the side of rejection, detachment, and non-commitment? Are you surprised when people blow you off or lead you on aka ghost, bench, gaslight or breadcrumb? Yet another paradox. Here we are thinking the world is a positive and reinforcing place, that we are interesting, we're so popular; then we get ghosted, breadcrumbed, benched.

Original Article Source: http://clarissasilva.com/ Study cited: HuffPost, Reader's Digest, Bustle, Elite Daily, Princeton Journalism Summer Journal, Teen Ink, Glamour (Poland), Yahoo Japan and MSN Japan.

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Social Media's Impact On Relationships And Self-Esteem - Thrive Global

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Your Happiness Hypothesis Study Findings

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Fears than being hooked on social media is creating a generation of depressed and anxious teenagers have been overstated, according to a study which found it has a "trivial" effect on life satisfaction.

Ministers and parent groups have raised the alarm about excessive time spent on sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

But University of Oxford researchers found little evidence to support it making heavy users less content.

They argue that society should "retire the screen time notion", and instead focus on whether particular aspects of online behaviour, or content, are harmful.

"With most of the current debate based on lacklustre evidence, this study represents an important step towards mapping the effects of technology on wellbeing," said Professor Andrew Przybylski, one of the lead authors of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings are among the first to try and unpick the complex link between wellbeing and social media use.

"Applying transparent and innovative statistical approaches we show that social media effects are not a one-way street, they are nuanced, reciprocal, possibly contingent on gender, and arguably trivial in size," the authors write.

It suggests that previous studies have failed to account for the fact that teens who were more depressed to begin with may spend more of their time on social media.

Because of this, Prof Preyzbylski says, study's which just look at screen time use and mental health symptoms produce "statistically noisy nonsense".

He added: "On an individual basis, time shouldn't be the thing that parents are worrying about. Thinking about social media like it's a black box that has kind of a ticking clock on top of it - that way of thinking about screen time is almost certainly wrong."

The new study analysed data on 12,000 British teenagers, taken from an eight-year survey of UK households.

Lower life satisfaction led to an increase in social media use and social media use led to lower life satisfaction, but the trends were only "modest", the authors said.

However, these effects were more pronounced in females than males, suggesting that social media use could potentially be more harmful among young women.

"What this shows us is we need to stop looking at social media as a whole and we need to start thinking about the nuances," co-lead author Amy Orben, from the University of Oxford, said.

In the wake of the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, fears have been raised about content promoting eating disorders or self harm.

Identifying how social media underpins this, or other harmful features would allow policy makers to act, but currently tech companies refuse to share anonymised data on their users for research.

"With the unknowns of social media effects still substantially outnumbering the knowns, it is critical that independent scientists, policymakers, and industry researchers cooperate more closely," the authors wrote.

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, has previously said that time spent in front of screens can be harmful by interfering with sleep, exercise or real world relationships.

"This paper suggests that social media has limited effect on teenage life satisfaction," said Dr Max Davie, a spokesperson for the RCPCH.

"We recommend that families follow our guidance published earlier this year and continue to avoid screen use for one hour before bed since there are other reasons beside mental health for children to need a good night's sleep."

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Social media harms overstated as study finds impact is 'trivial' on teens' well-being

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Fears than being hooked on social media is creating a generation of depressed and anxious teenagers have been overstated, according to a study which found it has a "trivial" effect on life satisfaction. Ministers and parent groups have raised the alarm about excessive time spent on sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

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Social media can have an impact on your body image and relationship to food due to the increased exposure to thin and toned body types and particular diets. Studies show that 88% of women compare themselves to images they observe on social media, with over half of them emphasising that the comparison is unfavourable. Whereas, 65% of men compare themselves to images on social media with 37% indicating that the comparison is unfavourable. This is extremely problematic as this can lead to lower self-esteem, unbalanced diet, deficiencies of vitamins and minerals and possibly eating disorders.

What Is Body Image?

The perception you have of your physical self and the thoughts and emotions that result from this perception is known as body image.

There are 4 important factors that can determine body image:

Perceptual body image (how you perceive your body)

Affective body image (how you feel about your body)

Cognitive body image (how you think about you body image)

Behavioural body image (how you behave as a result of your body image)

Nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge that how you experience your body might not always reflect reality. A distorted perception of your own body can manifest as body image distortions, which might result to eating disorders.
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The Role Of Social Media On Your Body Image Concerns

You are more likely than before to be influenced and experience body shame due to the constant exposure to particular body types on social media.
The #fitspiration and the eating healthy movement on Instagram:
Especially on Instagram, it is expected that you will remember images more than words due the image focused nature of the social network. Social media in general, allows you to decide what accounts to follow and by doing so, you are influenced by a particular content the accounts produce. For instance, the #fitspiration tag on Instagram is used to show pictures of thin and toned body types. Although the intention of this tag is to inspire you to become more healthy and fit, research of the #fitspiration tag on Instagram shows that these objectifying features of bodies have a negative impact on people's body image and self-esteem.

Recently, the "eating healthy movement" has become popular on Instagram. Some influencers might not provide any scientific evidence when they encourage you to cut out particular food groups, or to follow a certain diet to achieve an ideal body type. This is extremely problematic as it could lead to unbalanced diet and deficiencies in minerals and vitamins, in addition to psychological issues regarding food and possibly eating disorders such anorexia nervosa or orthorexia nervosa. In fact, recent research shows that greater Intagram use is associated with greater symptoms of orthorexia nervosa.
Negative social pressures-and comparisons
Social media allows you to feel like you have a personal connection to the people that share certain content (e.g. thin/toned bodies and healthy food) which makes it easier to be influenced. The selected exposure and influence of particular content can make you believe that a thin/toned body type or a certain diet is more natural than what it actually is.

For instance, visual body processing of others' bodies also involves processing of your own body, and body image is related with perception and action of the mental representation of a body. On social media, particular body types are prioritised as ideal body types and for that reason the society may perceive thin or toned body types, or particular diets to be more attractive and healthier than other ones. Majority of social media allows the users to like content produced by others; often idealised bodies and certain trendy diets receive many likes. In other words, certain bodies and diets are perceived as more attractive. This does also encourage objectification of bodies, in which bodies that are observed on social media are processed like objects and not human bodies. These social norms may impact how you view your body because humans have a general need to gain approval of others and avoid their disproval, as a result you might conform to the social norms related to appearance.

What Can You Do?

Social media negatively influences several people and this can affect self-esteem, body image, and relationship to food. Unhealthy eating patterns and behaviours can result to different mental-and physical health issues.

You can try to unfollow accounts that have a negative impact on your mental health. However, if you think you are struggling with mental health issues due to social media, our staff at EmotionMatters is here to help you.

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How Does Social Media Influence Body Image? | EmotionMatters

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Social media can have an impact on your body image and relationship to food due to the increased exposure to thin and toned body types and particular diets. Studies show that 88% of women compare themselves to images they observe on social media, with over half of them emphasising that the comparison is unfavourable.

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Whether you like it or not, social media is an integral part of the fabric of contemporary life. Politicians' Twitter posts have international implications; memes from Reddit form the bedrock of popular culture; brands compete for screen time alongside forgotten friends from high school; sharing selfies is now de rigueur for everyone from your preteen cousin to your grandmother; relevance is measured in followers and likes; and news, real or otherwise, is endlessly cycled, discussed, distorted, and sometimes even made on sites like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more. Social media is more than just a generator of attention-sucking disturbances that flash into view and just as quickly disappear: It's also how some two billion of us keep up with our friends and family, network with our colleagues, form and reform our political opinions, and generally express ourselves in a world that is more interconnected than ever before. Reckoning with the 21st century means, at least in part, reckoning with social media.

It's shouldn't come as much of a surprise, then, that artists (a famously curious bunch) have begun experimenting with this novel medium, teasing out its hidden implications and sending up its more baffling tropes. Born out of the '90s net art movement, where innovators like Heath Bunting and Yael Kanarek looked to the newly available World Wide Web as a site (get it?) for artistic experimentation and performative social connection, as well as the "surf clubs" of the early aughts, today's crop of social media artists work within the confines of the corporate-controlled social media sites that structure our daily lives in an effort to distort and question exactly those confines. Here, we've rounded up seven of the most interesting and impactful social media projects of recent years for your perusal, which are united by a shared taste for fakery, manipulation, withholding, and irony. Keep them in mind during your next bout of compulsive app scrolling.

Uploaded to YouTube just two years after the video-sharing site was launched, Cortright's VVEBCAM is an exercise in simplicity: the artist gazes blankly into a webcam (or, really, at the screen beneath the cam) as Ceephax's "Summer Frosby" plays off of her computer and a range of cartoony stock effects (dancing pizza slices, falling leaves, etc.) flash across the screen. She looks, above all else, slightly bored, barely engaged with whatever she's looking at onscreen but just interested enough to keep on looking as the images begin to flicker by faster and faster. The upload itself is tagged with hundreds of keywords, mostly irrelevant to the content of the video, that serve to bring in more and more viewers searching for unrelated content. (These tags eventually became the video's downfall; YouTube removed the video in 2011 based on the "offensive" nature of some of them.)

Despite its straightforward presentation, Cortright's work is now considered an early reworking of the self-objectification central to what we now might term "selfie culture," but with an important twist: The artist is looking back with the same barely-there expression of the passive video viewer. Social media content may be a vital aspect of our day-to-day existence, but VVEBCAM highlights some of its inherent banality.

Lauren Christiansen, Brad Troemel, and Other Artists: The Jogging, 2009-14

This collective project, spearheaded by Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen along with Joshua Citarella, Spencer Longo, Haley Mellin, Rachael Milton, Jesse Stecklow, Artie Vierkant, Andrew Norman Wilson, and submissions by thousands of other artists, is in part an attempt to answer an age-old question: "what is art?" While philosophers and artists have floated answers ranging from "the imitation of nature" to "literally whatever we say it is" over the years, the Jogging crew came up with their own novel definition: "stuff that's presented like art." In response to the rise of online contemporary-art roundups like Contemporary Art Daily and e-flux that were then quickly becoming the main conduits for viewing art from around the world, this group established a submission-based Tumblr page to share similar images.

There was, however, one big (or perhaps not so big) difference: Their posts were largely mockups, constructed using Photoshop to look like so many bona fide artworks of the time (messy, pop-culture-laden sculptures photographed against the clean white walls of a gallery and labeled with a title, medium, and artist name) without going to the trouble of physically realizing them. As the critic, curator, and current Postmasters Gallery director Kerry Doran writes in her 2017 essay "There's No Business Like...," this constituted "a tongue-in-cheek response to the newly forming reality that exhibitions would primarily be experienced through their documentation: Why make an object for the sake of being photographed when the tools exist to fake it?"

Though arguably just as much a work of art criticism as it is an art project, Jayson Musson's 25 YouTube videos released under the moniker Hennessy Youngman stand as vital documents of the shift in contemporary art from rarefied academic discipline to career-driven striving, a change precipitated in no small part from the rise of social media itself. In the videos, Youngman, bedecked in a cartoon-themed flat-brimmed cap, delivers his own scathing take on the artists and art practices so often exalted in the university setting, like relational aesthetics, institutional critique, and Post-Structuralism.

Such disdain for one's predecessors is of course standard for any self-respecting young artist, but Youngman's blend of bombastic humor and political acuity coupled with his riff on "YouTube personality" tropes then coming into being (think direct webcam addresses, outlandish statements, and simple but effective graphic overlays) makes his jabs at the establishment memorable. (I challenge you to watch his video on Bruce Nauman and not think of Youngman's take every time you see the venerated video artist referenced.) Perhaps his most important commentary comes from his 2010 video "ART THOUGHTZ: How To Be A Successful Artist, " which includes such helpful steps as "be white" and "be a white male," and has an unforgettable disquisition on painting a flower. If only the advice weren't as relevant today.

Remember Second Life? For a while after its 2003 launch, it seemed that the virtual world created by Linden Lab would be the one to finally make good on the promises of '90s techno-utopians, who saw the Internet as a place of unbridled creative expression and social connectivity where anyone could reimagine themselves as anything else. But, like so many other examples from the brief history of the Web, its users gradually got bored and left, or else turned to increasingly elaborate forms of avatar-on-avatar eroticism, leaving Second Life as a depopulated relic of its former glory.

Into this emptying world strolled Sara Ludy, whose "Projection Monitor" project documents its more mundane aspects. Ludy uses a real camera to shoot images of Second Life landscapes and interiors displayed on a computer screen, adding an extra layer of remove to the content being photographed, before posting them onto the project's Tumblr page. While many a think piece has commented on the bizarre nature of the simulation and the social interactions it engenders, Ludy focuses instead on quieter scenes, almost always devoid of avatars, that are at once peaceful and slightly creepy. If the other social media projects on this list attempt to fit themselves into vibrant online ecosystems, Ludy is perhaps a kind of e-archaeologist, documenting a forgotten civilization long after its denizens had passed on.

The Dutch artist Constant Dullaart is known for a variety of conceptual projects centered around the Internet and digital technologies, many of which are relatively complex and specific to the history of computing. This one, however, is fairly simple: for $5,000, Dullaart purchased some 2.5 million fake Instagram followers, which he distributed among a group of art-world accounts (including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ai Weiwei, Petra Cortright, and more) in an effort to "equalize" their apparent relevance. In a world that measures cultural capital by how widely your "influence" extends (or seems to extend), fake followers represent a nearly socialist attempt at wealth redistribution.

Of course, such wealth is only virtual, created, in this case, by a Lithuanian eBay contact. The question then becomes where the actual value of followers lies. In 2014, Dullaart's gesture was often read as a commentary on the emptiness of social media striving, but, in light of the apparently pernicious role of similar "bots" in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it takes on a more insidious tone today. In a time when social media and political reality are increasingly conflated, an army of fake online followers can indeed wield real-world power.

A project that has been lauded as "the first Instagram masterpiece" by the London Telegraph, and which has earned her spots in shows from the Tate Modern to the New Museum, Amalia Ulman's Excellences & Perfections has created a new standard for what's possible in an online performance.

Over the course of six months in 2014, the Argentinean-born artist documented what appeared to be a personal journey of self-discovery on her Instagram profile. Narrated by her photos and captions, Ulman sets out to reinvent herself in Los Angeles, dyeing her hair blonde, adhering to a strict but trendy diet, posting aspirational cliches, flaunting apparent wealth in the form of various "hot" consumer goods, posing seductively, getting breast implants, and generally presenting herself as the archetypal Instagram It Girl. Along the way, she garnered thousands of followers, becoming one of many mini-celebs whose lifestyle and presentation online now inform the American conception of what it means to live "the good life." The only catch: It was an act, at least partially. The plastic surgery was staged, the hashtagged bromides pre-planned (the diet and the hair dye, however, were real).

In various artist talks and statements after the fact, Ulman revealed that her real motivation was to challenge what a female artist is "supposed" to be in the current era and to point to the distance between women's success-driven online self-presentation and the reality of their lives. Indeed, she seems to have struck a nerve: She recounts that many of her pre- Excellences art-world colleagues sought to distance themselves from what they thought was her "gaudy" new identity. One can't help but wonder what they think now.

Though by design not as splashy as some of the other entries on this list, American Artist's (yes, that's his name) performance project is a subtle reminder of the hidden economics at the heart of supposedly "free" sites like Facebook. Over the course of a full year, Artist redacted all content he would ordinarily have posted online for his followers: Photos became rectangles in Facebook blue that are reminiscent of the Microsoft "blue screen of death," while text posts were blacked out in the manner of classified government documents. Meanwhile, the legible content these redactions referred to was systematically archived, in physical form, for the perusal of those who made an in-person appointment to view them.

The result is a repudiation of Facebook's basic business model, in which users provide free labor and content, paid for only in "likes," which in turn attracts more users and, eventually, advertisers, who of course pay the platform owners (not the content creators) for the privilege of accessing their users. By opting out of this system without exiting it entirely, Artist points to a kind of cruelty at the heart of social media; as he writes in his statement on the project, the platforms offer users an experience "[a]s if the faces of those they love or admire are being dangled from a string in front of them - plainly out of reach, but close enough to keep them running on a treadmill that fuels the spectacle of society." Think about that the next time your mom comments something embarrassing on your latest status.

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'Like' Art: 7 Masterpieces of Social Media Art That Will Make It Into the History Books | artnet News

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Whether you like it or not, social media is an integral part of the fabric of contemporary life.

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From surveillance to intimacy, these artists explore social media's influence on our day to day interactions

Social media has proved to be an indispensable part of people's everyday lives. We turn to social media for communicating, keeping up with news and events, quelling boredom, activism, marketing, and everything in between. This omnipresent force in our social lives has unsurprisingly become the subject of a range of contemporary artworks. Representations of social media in art can sometimes be overly critical-touching on themes of addiction, indulgence, and disengagement with the 'real world'. The following artworks present an alternative perspective, highlighting the way social media has changed the way we interact with the world without berating it.

01. 'Hansel and Gretel' by Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron

Ai Weiwei has teamed up with Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron to create an immersive installation that tackles the issues of surveillance and privacy in the age of social media. The site-specific installation is held at New York's Park Avenue Armory. Upon entering the gallery, visitors walk through several dimly lit hallways leading to the gallery's main space, the Drill Hall. The Drill Hall is filled with a network of infrared censors and drones which track patrons' movements and not only feeds the footage to various locations throughout the gallery, but also to an online live stream.

'Hansel and Gretel' prompts participants to think about their right to privacy. On a larger scale this means surveillance cameras and drones monitoring our movements, but on a smaller scale it also includes the fact that every man and their dog now has a camera phone that can be used to invade someone else's privacy. If you want to check it out, 'Hansel and Gretel' will be exhibiting at Park Avenue Armory until August 6.

02. 'The Artist is Kinda Present' by An Xiao

An Xiao 's performance piece ran alongside Marina Abramovic's 'The Artist is Present' at the MoMA in 2010. Viewers were invited to sit in front of Xiao and engage with her by sending a text or Tweet. Xiao responded to participants' messages until they got bored or reached a 'satisfactory connection'. There was a stark and perhaps purposeful contrast between Xiao and Abramovic's works. While Abramovic wore all white and sat in a chair completely visible and exposed to participants, Xiao wore all black, including sunglasses, and was almost hidden behind the laptop and phone in front of her. Xiao's piece speaks volumes about the way technology mediates our social connections and relationships, and contrasts between online and offline communication.

03. 'Tinder Diaries' by Audrey Jones

Similarly to Xiao's exploration of social connections, Audrey Jones ' 2017 work dissects romance, intimacy, and the modern day courtship facilitated by dating apps. In a series of comics, Jones illustrates the brash, vulgar, and downright disgusting messages that are often sent and received on Tinder. By putting a face or body to each message, Jones highlights the aspect of digital communication that allows us to hide behind a screen and say things we might not otherwise say in person.

04. 'Tinder Project' by Jiyeon Kim

Tinder matches are also the subject of Jiyeon Kim 's 'Tinder Project'. Kim paints portraits based on people's Tinder profiles, painting them how she perceives them rather than how they've chosen to portray themselves. Kim's work makes a statement about our carefully curated online personas and presents a "contemporary view of how we perceive ourselves on a daily basis".

05. Embroidery work by Hanecdote

Hannah Hill, better known by her Instagram handle Hanecdote, has quickly gained an Internet following for her needlepoint work, which often features social media symbolism. A recurring theme in her work is the representation of contemporary social issues framed within the screen of an iPhone. These works demonstrate how modern communication devices can facilitate everything from body positivity, gender politics, unwanted dick pics and questionnable censorship policies.

06. 'Emoji Nation' by Nastya Ptichek

Nastya Ptichek's work combines classical paintings with Emoji and other forms of online communication in a five-part series that explores the way social media has changed how we communicate and express ourselves. In part 2 of the series Ptichek superimposes online symbols over oil paintings by Edward Hopper. One painting depicts a man expressing affection with a kissing face Emoji above his head, while the woman next to him expresses uncertainty with the messenger ellipsis icon. The series reflects how real life emotions are played out online and the grey area that interesects the two. Part 4 focuses on error messages and combines them with Renaissance paintings to produce a humorous take on what these religious icons would say if they could communicate digitally. Ptichek's work is all about communication, the way we interact with each other, and how social media has changed and influenced our interactions.

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Six contemporary artists making a statement about social media - Acclaim Magazine

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From surveillance to intimacy, these artists explore social media's influence on our day to day interactions Social media has proved to be an indispensable part of people's everyday lives. We turn to social media for communicating, keeping up with news and events, quelling boredom, activism, marketing, and everything in between.

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As the globe becomes more technologically advanced due to human research and humanities ambition to improve and move forward, the people of the world in general have increased their time and usage spent with electronics such as phones, fac

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Young couple at the bar_ Concept of  by Antonio Gravante Market on @creativemarket

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Research has shown that social media can affect the quality of our relationships. In fact, one survey study with 205 Facebook users demonstrated that a higher level of Facebook usage was associated with negative relationship outcomes (Clayton, Nagurney, & Smith, 2013). In addition, those relationships experienced Facebook-related conflict (Clayton, et al., 2013). Facebook usage has also been linked to increased feelings of jealousy (Muise, Christofides, & Desmarais, 2009).

Another study showed that exposure, after a breakup, to an ex's Facebook profile may hinder the process of healing and moving on (Marshall, 2012). In fact, checking up on an ex's profile led to more distress over the breakup, more negative feelings, and less personal growth (Marshall, 2012).

Research has demonstrated the toll that social media can take, not only on our current relationships but also on our ability to form new relationships. However, getting off social media is a challenge for many people, as a great deal of our communication happens online. If we want to remain online, but safeguard our relationships and ability to cope after a breakup, what steps can we take to make our online environment a bit safer?
1. Unfollow and/or remove your exes from social media.
It is nearly impossible to get over a person if your social media feed is constantly bombarded by pictures of him/her. If your goal is to remain friends with your ex, an honest conversation with him/her noting that you need your distance while the breakup is still fresh may be worthwhile. You may choose to unfollow him/her (if an option on the platform), rather than completely removing your former flame.

Muise et al. (2009) found in their study of 308 undergraduates that "Facebook may expose an individual to potentially jealousy-provoking information about their partner, which creates a feedback loop whereby heightened jealousy leads to increased surveillance of a partner's Facebook page. Persistent surveillance results in further exposure to jealousy-provoking information" (p. 443). In order to break this cycle, try to remove yourself from social media to whatever extent possible.
2. Be aware of your online presence.
Yes, breakups can be hard, and yes, they can be very painful. However, it is important not to air any dirty laundry over the internet. What you put out there has a way of getting around and remaining public (even if swiftly deleted). If you are having a tough time, it is important to seek support from family, friends, and/or a professional. Do not solicit advice or vent about past problems to your social media communities. This may come back to haunt you. In addition, oversharing may actually alienate your other online friends.

Sharing too much has been shown to decrease the quality of real-life relationships. A study with 508 Facebook users found that sharing too many selfies can actually lead to a decrease in intimacy in relationships (Houghton, Joinson, Caldwell, & Marder, 2013). The authors suggest that a certain level of censorship is necessary so as not to alienate your companions by your online behavior.
3. Carry out your new relationship(s) IRL and not through social media.
Focus less on creating the perfect social media story and enjoy the time you spend with your partner and friends in real time in the real world. If everything is distilled through a website, you aren't making the most of the time you spend together.

A Danish study by the Happiness Research Institute focusing on 1,095 participants found that those who went a week without Facebook reported greater life satisfaction (Happiness Research Institute, 2015). Therefore, it is important to cut back on your social media usage.

While social media can be a great way to connect with those we haven't seen in a while and keep in contact with family, co-workers, and friends, it can have some negative side effects, especially when it comes to our romantic lives. Be conscious of how you engage with social media and use it sparingly. Avoid focusing too much on the past and live your life with your current partner in a meaningful way, and not for the purpose of a "perfect" post.

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Research has shown that social media can affect the quality of our relationships. In fact, one survey study with 205 Facebook users demonstrated that a higher level of Facebook usage was associated with negative relationship outcomes (Clayton, Nagurney, & Smith, 2013). In addition, those relationships experienced Facebook-related conflict (Clayton, et al., 2013).

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Young Women, Narcissism and the Selfie Phenomenon | Mary McGill | TEDxGalway

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A Social Life | Award Winning Short Film | Social Media Depression

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Is Social Media to Blame for Poor Body Positivity? | Loose Women

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Everything that’s wrong with women in the media | Holly Baxter | TEDxYouth@Manchester

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Are You Living an Insta Lie? Social Media Vs. Reality

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Fat Girl Blues  B&W Fine art Photo print Black White _ Etsy

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How Facebook and Twitter Are Taking Over Our Lives _ Philadelphia magazine