No matter where you are at emotionally, staying off social media through the course of a divorce may be beneficial in more ways than one.
Putting your life on display might work against you and leave you with fewer assets or custody rights than you hope to receive. It can also cause enough friction to make a low-conflict divorce a nightmare.
Settlement impact
Being open about your life on an online platform may impact how much alimony, marital property or parenting time you end up receiving. Attorneys work hard to get the best possible settlement for their clients. This means that digging through social media or looking at a screenshot your spouse shares is often on the table. So, if there are recent posts of you talking about an advance you received at work, then you might end up with less spousal support or assets than you anticipated. And posts of back to back nights of partying might not put you in the best position to earn custodial parent rights.
Marital fault
You might opt for strict privacy settings on social media. But, if you have mutual friends with your soon-to-be-ex, then they may share information with your ex that you hoped would stay in a private message. Maybe you weren’t faithful to your spouse through the course of your marriage and the private message shared with your ex spells out the promises you broke. Someone looking into getting a divorce might already have an inkling that their spouse hasn’t been as faithful as they claim to be. Social media can help back their intuition, and a resident of Virginia can file for a divorce based on the marital fault committed.
Private mode
Breaking up with someone, separating your assets and your plans for splitting custody don’t need to be on the top of all your social media follower’s news feeds. Perhaps you are comfortable being open online. However, a divorce is about your ex and not just you and they might not want you sharing any or everything.
At some point, your lives might not be so intertwined and you’ve both had ample time to cope with closing one chapter and starting a new one. But for the time being, it might be wise to log off for a while.