I hate social media. I really do.

Well, okay… maybe there are some good things about it.

Being able to post pictures of your family so other family members who aren’t there get to see it (instead of having to text all those pictures ou)t.

Being able to post status updates for all of your family or friends instead of having to text all of the people or call all the people… I get it. I really do.

There are good things about social media that I find really beneficial.

But the worse part of social media is…

…when you’re not getting along with somebody – social media exacerbates all the miscommunication between the two of you.

For example, you see that they posted something instead of contacting you.

This is the problem with social media. People have run out of excuses. They can’t say they don’t have time to get in touch with you anymore, which maybe you could have believed if you didn’t see that they had the time to post pictures on social media.

Because in the amount of time it took to post something on social media, they could have easily reached out and called you or texted you.

And this is where social media gets dangerous and leads to some very dangerous situations with people you’re dating.

Because all of a sudden you check your Facebook or Instagram or Twitter feed just to pass the time, and while you’re passing the time to try to figure out why you’re not connecting, you look and see they posted something. They posted three or four pictures in the time that you were all in turmoil about the relationship and full of anxiety.

They were happily posting pictures of themselves.

Pictures of their kids.

Memes and thoughts.

All while clearly not in the same turmoil as you.

They clearly felt fine about what was going down between the two of you, and they just went on posting all over social media.

This is where it gets bad.

So, being connected with someone you’re dating on social media is dangerous this way, and you really have two options if you want to be proactive and avoid all the anxiety and miscommunication that this will bring you.

The first option is: you can talk about this ahead of time and really say, “Hey look, I think posting on social media can lead to some very dangerous things, so it might be better that we don’t follow one another in case we have an argument or we’re not connecting.”

Because it’s another way to misinterpret your importance to that person, and in a relationship we don’t want to misinterpret our importance.

If someone is on a time-out with you, it’s okay and it’s perfectly acceptable. But the minute you see them posting all over social media, you think to yourself, “Well, they’re on a time-out, obviously they don’t give a damn about me. They’d much rather entertain their friends via social media.”

You know, there are so many things that it can turn into while you’re alone with your anxiety.

The second option is to simply avoid social media altogether. Delete your accounts and just say goodbye to social media.

A good friend of mine turned off his social media accounts a couple of weeks ago for this exact reason. Because he realized it was really detrimental to the relationship. If he was feeling funky, he would go and check out her Instagram account and realize, well, she hasn’t contacted me in a day. But yet, here she is reporting all hr updates to the world on social media.

Yet, these are the times that we live in.

Like it or not, social media is here to stay. And we’re not going to eliminate it at all.

Because it’s so ingrained in our culture these days. People actually do use social media for more than just memes and pictures and updates. They use it for business. They use it to connect with people you went to high school with twenty years ago, which you would never have been able to do without social media.

So we can’t run from social media. It’s here to stay. That’s the reality.

But, we have to find ways to maintain our sanity in a world where we’re barely connecting via voice and being hung out to dry and being ignored via text. So, I strongly suggest you turn off all social media. Or at the very least have that conversation with your partner ahead of time.

So then that way, you won’t have anything else to react to if things are not going right between the two of you.

Just take my advice. Despite your addiction to social media, it’s good advice and if you follow it you will eventually think, “You know, that David Wygant was right.”

You don’t need to follow each other. You just need to love one another.