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On Line Relationships Can Be Costly

Every year there are thousands of couples entering into marriage counseling with the complaint that outside friendships and influences have played too big a role in the destruction of their marriage.

Friendships and family are a huge part of what makes up a person’s internal monitor of what is and isn’t acceptable or right. If every friend is telling them that their spouse is horrible, unresponsive and cruel, eventually those opinions are going to have influence. This can be a good thing, in those cases where objective opinions are needed. However, in many cases outside friends are simply getting only one part of the story. Their opinion is based only half an equation. It is up to you to ensure that, if you are going to solicit outside advice on your marriage, you will be responsible enough to give the information needed to get that advice accurately.

Online Friendhips can be Costly

Online friendships are opening up entirely new realms of issues for couples, and are becoming a popular complaint in counseling sessions.

Deborah was spending a lot of time with her friends, talking about her relationship with Stephen. While Deborah took a lot of advice from her friends, the problem is that none of them had ever met Stephen and didn’t realize the true dynamics of the issues. Deborah was spending more and more time with her online friends and almost no time with Stephen. He was growing jealous of the time she spent with virtual friendships, and resentful that none of the time was with him.

The marriage counselor was quickly able to see that Deborah’s obsession with online relationships, while strictly friendships, had taken a toll on her real life relationship with her husband. Through counseling, Deborah was able to limit her time online and understand where she began to pull away physically into a non-threatening virtual world because of the control and ease of conflict avoidance.

This article was written by Staff Writer, and posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 6:52 am. It is filed under Marriage Counselors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.