Who doesn’t know it: while you’re lounging around on the sofa with your loved one in sweatpants, actually quite happy with the world, other couples pose on Instagram: permanently holding hands, kissing, on vacation in bikinis and shorts, doing extreme sports or climbing of Mount Everest. Envy can rise in you and worry about doing something wrong yourself. But this concern is completely unjustified, as a study by the photography magazine “Shotkit” now shows.
According to this, people who frequently show their partner on social media are more often than average unhappy in their relationship. For the study, 2,000 couples between the ages of 18 and 50 were asked about their use of social media and their happiness in love. The impressive result: Couples who share three or more couple selfies a week online appear to be 128 percent less happy than those who keep their relationship private.
The couples, who rarely present their better half on Instagram and Co., stated that they felt uncomfortable or even embarrassed, that their privacy was important to them, or that they generally did not actively use social networks often. There was also a clear cut in the age groups: Older millennials (approx. 31 to 41 years) post private things online much more frequently than younger users.
In any case, the numbers speak for themselves: Of the couples who frequently share updates about their relationship and photos of their partner publicly, only 10 percent describe themselves as “very happy” in their partnership. Of the couples in which this hardly ever occurs, it is at least 46 percent. So it doesn’t seem so wrong to spend cozy and undocumented time together. Or bungee jumping together if you feel like it – just not permanently documented for the internet.
Sources: Shotkit, “Miss”
