Online love & infidelity. We're in the game, what are the rules? | Michelle Drouin | TEDxNaperville

in 1993 when I was 19 I did something really bold I walked up to a boy at a crowded university dining hall and I said hi I'm Michelle what's your name now this was a pre-internet time so I had to walk up to a table full of boys with all my pride aside and basically ask one of them do you like me I've thought about this moment hundreds of times of the last 20 years but lately these thoughts have taken on a different flavour lately I've begun to wonder how often in today's technological world do people really have to put their feelings on the line like this where rejection would be so immediate and so palpable 92% of young adults use social media and more and more are turning the dating apps like tinder where you merely have to swipe right to find a date and with virtually no risk because if you swipe right and the other person doesn't they don't even know you swipe them when I walked up to that boy it took courage a fundamental human attribute where is that courage when you merely need to swipe right and what effect is this having on a whole generation of digital natives going back to my story for a moment my approaching a table full of 19 year old boys did not go as well as I had hoped the boy sitting across from him said don't you know him he's PC he's a famous hockey player well apparently he's not that famous I said give a quick smile to PC and walked away thinking oh that couldn't have gone any worse nonetheless three days later PC the famous hockey player and I were officially an item everything I then learned about love courtship and sexuality I learned at a time when people really had little black books there were no mobile phones and the internet was still something you dialed up and also in this unique arena of athletics where the mate competition was fierce for him he had his adoring fans and for me he had 20 strapping teammates every year who my age and just my type I remember the first time I felt this competition a girl in my sorority Abbey came up to me one Sunday morning and said she'd met my boyfriend at a party the night before he's really cute she said uh yeah yeah is my eyes narrowed because that's all I've got I'm the daughter of two hippies so that is pretty much my most aggressive move but this competition I felt is not unique to the world of athletics every one of you is surrounded by potential mating alternatives and science says you're looking at them more than 50 years ago relationship researchers were looking into the reasons why people persist in relationships the prevailing theory at the time was Kellyanne t-bolts inner dependence theory that stated that dependence is based on two processes satisfaction so how much is my partner meeting my most important needs and quality of alternatives how desirable is my best alternative to this relationship Carol Russell's investment model scale is probably the most widely used scale used today and she added an additional dimension of investment or the resources tied to the relationship that would be lost if the relationship ended like friends relatives connections more investment leads to greater dependence and this is related to higher commitment now a commonality of both of these models is that we are continually evaluating the quality of the alternatives around us the fundamental question is is there in this world I exist in a better match for me for those of us who are in highly satisfied and committed relationships we tend to devalue those potential alternatives but when satisfaction or investment falter we might see more quality in the alternatives around us so when Abby came up to me and told me that my boyfriend was cute I guess it was to be expected she was a mating alternative revealing herself to me in a mostly benign manner and although I felt a pang of competition I also thought what is she going to do remember this is 1993 was she going to call my boyfriend on his landline and risk me answering or try to meet up with him face to face no of course not because that would have been against the rules today's world is a totally new world not only the rules have changed but it is an entirely new game mobile phones social media sites like Facebook Instagram Twitter they have changed the game want to find your third grade girlfriend she's probably on Facebook like 71 percent of American adults if not Googler it'll only take you a few seconds to find her and what about the people you meet let's say you're out at a bar and you need a friend of so-and-so gathering little information about them except for their first name and where they work even with partial information it is easy to make every sexual romantic social connection you have ever imagined and then every time you sit down with your computer or with your mobile phone you have access to every person you have ever been attracted to in your entire life plus those you have not yet met think about that for a moment for the first time in human history you have access to everyone in other words the Internet is an easy place to find love with a seemingly endless array of options there's a really superb study out of Stanford by Michael Rosenfeld called the how couples meet and stay together study and they found that there has been a drastic rise in couples meeting online since the late 1990s in fact one-fifth of heterosexual couples and two-thirds of the homosexual couples in their study who met in 2010 met online but recent research with the same data set by a didi paul has found that people who met online are more likely to break up and they're also less likely to get married in the first place of the couples who met offline 2/3 got married of the couples who met online only 1/3 got married but why is this happening well maybe when you hit a rough patch in your relationship and you've already had success meeting a partner online you think I'll be ok I have approximately more or less millions of alternatives I'll be fine and some of them I already know they're in that little electronic black book that we all keep you know your friends list Facebook Instagram Twitter friends the term is innocent enough but could it be that hiding behind the guise of friendship on these various social media applications are people that you would sleep with or have a relationship with Jason Dibble Dan Miller and I have been looking into this possibility in our most recent study we had people in committed relationships scroll through their Facebook friends list and count the number of people they would sleep with or have a relationship with if they were single on average women would have a relationship with three of their Facebook friends and they would sleep with eight of them you think that's a lot men would have a relationship with eight of their Facebook friends and they would sleep with 26 of them 26 and that was the average which means that some men said they would sleep with basically all of their Facebook friends now we also wondered how many of these people are they keeping in contact with you know simmering on the back burner in case their current relationship failed so when a study we published in 2014 we define the term back burner to a group of young adults we told them that a back burner is someone you are romantically or sexually interested in who you're not in a current relationship with but with whom you maintain contact with the thought there might be some future romantic or sexual connection not surprisingly young adults had a lot of these - on average women had four back burners on average men had eight now most of them they communicated with in a platonic way but some of them they communicated with in a romantic or sexual way for women on average one they communicated with in a romantic or sexual way and for men on average three now these results weren't entirely surprising remember the relationship theories say that we are continually evaluating the alternatives around us but we were surprised to find that single people had no more back burners than people who were in committed relationships and even more shockingly it didn't matter how many back burners you had or even the number you communicated with in a sexual or romantic way this was unrelated to your investment in or commitment to your current partner but wait a second didn't I just tell you the relationship theories say that if you are highly invested in your relationship and satisfied your suppose a D value those alternatives and wouldn't that make you less likely to keep in contact with them not necessarily today's technological landscape of communication makes it so easy for us to communicate with the people we are attracted to and although we might begin that communication innocently with no romantic designs over the course of getting to know someone you might begin to think maybe I could see myself with this person someday in the future and a backburner relationship is born but why are we forming these relationships online I keep referring to this as an easy process but what scientific evidence do I have well first let's think about the asynchronous nature of the communication give most of us 20 minutes and Google and I'm pretty sure we could pretend to be experts on just about anything then give us some time to craft a funny and witty message and I'm pretty sure we'd all be quite charming anyone who reads knows that it is possible to fall in love with someone's words so people chatting online might get really intimate really quickly but why intimacy while hovering right above safety on Maslow's hierarchy of needs is our need for love belongingness and intimacy we want to share our lives with others and we do this all the time online think of your Facebook newsfeed it has all these little stories of people's lives evidence that it is natural for us as humans to want to build connections with others and to have intimacy in our relationships so we have all this intimacy in our relationships whether they're offline or online but some researchers say that is actually easier perhaps to do this online because the online environment enhances intimacy while their proposes that something called hyper personal communication occurs online where we idealize the center of the message we take time to craft messages that depict our best selves and then we interpret messages in a way that serves to enhance intimacy in the relationship so people chatting online can get close really quickly on the surface this all doesn't sound so bad the Internet has lots of options for love and intimacy and it seems easy to make these types of connections so what's the problem well one of the problems is is that the Internet is also a place that's ripe for deception first it is easy to lie about who you are online in extreme cases like catfishing highlighted in an MTV reality series people could pose to be someone completely different than who they are and this is more common than you think Monica Witte found that many people more than half in most cases were lying in chat rooms about their age their gender their income their occupation and online daters they're lying - research has found that many lie about their height their weight the romantic intentions their interests and some even use photos of other people so thinking back on it is probably not a big surprise the people who meet online are more likely to break up maybe sometimes the fantasy does not match the reality but what about the social applications we all use no one's lying on those right I mean because I'm going to really lie on Facebook how often do you misrepresent yourself online maybe you don't lie about your age but you probably don't post that picture where you're looking old tired and Haggard I don't and maybe you don't lie about who you are but when was the last time you posted anything about yourself that would cast you in an unfavorable light is this line even a little bit so I think we'd all agree that misrepresentation does can occur online but there's another avenue for deception and that is that it is easy to cheat online one only needs to think about the website Ashley Madison the most famous name and infidelity and married dating whose tagline is life is short have an affair to know that the Internet provides opportunities to cheat but much of the cheating that goes on likely occurs outside of this organized arena via text messaging and the everyday social messaging applications that we all use with friends back burners innocent connections that turn into something more one of the most disturbing statistics that I've heard recently is that Facebook has been cited in one-third of the recent divorces in the United States one-third so any way you look at it many of us are already playing this game of online love but we don't even have a clear sense of the rules we have rules for face-to-face cheating scripts we learn these rules from our parents our past relationships our cultures so if a man were to sneak off while his wife were sleeping in bed and to go meet a woman in a private place and they had sex we probably all agree that's cheating if he leaves his wife sleeping in bed and he goes and meets this woman then maple strip down and show each other their naked bodies still many of us would consider this cheating if he leaves his wife sleeping in bed goes and meets this woman and they have a conversation and he shares his life his feelings his dreams so many would consider this cheating but what if that same man is sitting alone in his living room what if they naked body he sees is in a picture or what if he's just sitting there chatting to a woman he finds attractive about his life his feelings his dreams now is it cheating generally the research on what constitutes infidelity shows that most but not all people believe that emotional infidelity the most innocent of the scenarios is betrayal whether face-to-face or online there is secrecy Trust has been broken and time has been invested in someone other than one's partner most times these issues of betrayal are addressed after the fact after a partner has already found out about the online relationship so marital therapists are encouraging people to develop new scripts actively then include what they will and will not accept in terms of online behavior so what are the rules of online love in your relationship do you share passwords does your partner have full access to your phone can you befriend your ex on social media what about the people you find attractive can you have an intimate relationship with someone online provided you never intend to meet them I've devoted much of my recent life to studying in this area and even I don't have a clear sense of the rules but this is what I do know the world has changed a lot since the day I approached that boy in the dining hall I married that famous hockey player that's right and we have two young sons and just like the rest of you we are trying to navigate our way through this new world of cell phones and internet and social media where the mate competition is everybody so much so that as I was rehearsing this talk he turned to me and asked so what are our rules I don't know babe but like it or not we all of us were already in the game thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 430,803

Rating: 4.8171988 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Social Science, Communication, Sex, Social Media

Id: gQGjAp4GXU4

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2016