Chat Rooms Cause for Divorce? Really?   by William Ham

in Internet / Forums    (submitted 2011-03-04)

It has been suggested that 10 percent of all divorces in the United Kingdom are caused directly by the Internet. This seems to be a fallacy at the outset; digging deeper into the reasoning behind such mindless punditry bears that out. If anything, adult chat rooms have been a boon to divorced individuals, with no shortage of support groups and advice sharing on the World Wide Web. The logic is worth dissecting, though.

Broad (and Unhelpful) Generalizations

The belief is that people who are 25 to 35 years old are the ones most likely to fall into the clutches of the Internet Divorce Monster. The alleged reasoning behind this straw-pile of conjecture is that those who are in that age bracket are the most likely to be tech-savvy, whereas older, blue-collar workers are considered to be "computer illiterate". Does anyone else out there find that to be just a wee bit insulting? To be factual about it, it is true that the younger people are when they get married, the more likely they are to split up.

The Usual Suspects - And Then Some

The presence of online gambling and pornography is also cited as causative to divorce. Gambling can be done all over the place, though, especially in the U.K., where fruit machines (what Americans call slot machines) are in every pub, club and airport concourse - although fruit machines can be played online for free as well. And pornography existed for thousands of years before the Internet was around.

Of course, adult chat rooms (as well as services that allow you to easily "look up" people from your past) are also assigned a dollop of blame for today's divorce rates. Some of the words that come to mind are poppycock, balderdash and nonsense. Social media sites bring people together. They don't tear them apart. Usually when someone tries to tell you otherwise, that person turns out to be a divorce attorney, who makes his or her living feeding off of matrimonial road-kill.

About the Author

Will is a frequent visitor to adult chat rooms. He encourages all adults who are looking to meet new people to check out a chat room.