There’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with your spouse – no two individuals are exactly alike, and few partners hold every opinion and belief in common. Lively discussion and topical debate can be interesting and energizing in a marriage. And when it comes to the true hot-button issues in your relationship, learning to manage disputes constructively can help you get to know and understand each other better, deepening your bond.
Healthy marriages are built on trust, emotional connection, openness, good communication, quality time, shared values (at least some basics), and a sense of safety and security in your identity as a couple – and in the world you inhabit together.
There are many ways in which online life can disrupt relationship dynamics. In some cases, it erodes trust and intimacy to a dangerous degree. From virtual affairs to AI companions to simply spending too much time distracted by devices, our interaction with the digital world is impacting marriage, changing what we think of as cheating, and challenging our ideas of what’s real.
But how important is it to agree on certain basic truths? To have a foundation of common understanding? To exist in the same reality?
One particularly divisive problem in our social media-saturated society is now being recognized and researched as a driver of modern breakups: political misinformation and disinformation. It can create extreme polarization and skewed worldviews, cause people to retreat into risky subcultures (such as communities built around conspiracy theories), and leave partners living in separate “realities.”
Experts point out that while misinformation and disinformation are different, both can be problematic in relationships. Misinformation is inaccurate, incorrect, or false information. Disinformation is false information that is intentionally shared or spread with the intention to mislead.
In a recent study, published in the journal New Media and Society, Emily Van Duyn, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, interviewed 28 people “who had recently ended a relationship with a partner whose political ideology did not match their own.”
The relationships that fell apart included committed dating relationships, cohabiting couples, and marriages that ended in divorce after decades together. The interviewees and their ex-partners represented a broad spectrum of political identities/affiliations: Democrats, Republicans, Progressives, Conservatives, and Libertarians.
During in-depth discussions, many study participants said “media choices were responsible for the political differences that ultimately caused the relationships to end.”
Happy spouses can have different political points of view – indeed, some well-known pairs, such as pundits James Carville and Mary Matalin, have made marriage work despite a staunch right-left divide.
Notably, the study’s author points out, “these relationships were not doomed for failure because of differing political beliefs….They failed, at least in part, because those differing beliefs were associated with different realities that disrupted a shared identity and shared reality with their partner.”
“We really expect our romantic partners to have this shared reality – a similar view or understanding of the world to ours,” Van Duyn said. “It is much more important in romantic relationships than in other types of relationships because we are more dependent and interwoven in our day-to-day lives with our partners. Scholars have found that this shared sense of reality is really important for the success and happiness of romantic partnerships because it fosters closeness.”
At this point, it’s no secret that one of the greatest dangers of the algorithm is its tendency (by design) to lead us systematically into deeper and deeper rabbit holes based on our own questions, ideas, opinions, and biases; to validate, encourage, entrench, and intensify them.
According to study participants, while they and their partners may have had different political positions to begin with, what resulted in relationship breakdown was one partner’s increasingly extreme ideology, particularly when an identity formed around it, or when the couple’s completely divergent views of truth simply became irreconcilable. According to the report, friction could be particularly intense if one partner questioned the “validity of the information, media, or communities that the other person was enmeshed with.”
As one partner’s ideas, beliefs, or behavior become more extreme, radicalized, or detached from proven fact, it can feel increasingly like you’re living in separate, conflicting worlds. The disconnect can be devastating.
In a climate where we often can’t even agree on objective truth, where the lines between fact and fiction are blurred, where the very existence of “deep fakes” can make us believe things that aren’t real and distrust things that are, where a term like “alternative facts” can be invented and uttered with a straight face, it appears the risk to couples is… well, real.
For tips on navigating political discord in marriage, read our post “State of the Union – Marriage in an Age of Political Polarization.” And if you’ve come to the difficult decision that your differences are truly irreconcilable, the experienced and compassionate attorneys at SFLG can help you navigate your dissolution.
By Debra Schoenberg
