Somewhere right now, a woman is filming herself in bed, phone propped against a pillow, explaining to a few thousand strangers why marriage is a trap. She has never been married. She still lives with her parents.
It does not seem to matter. Her video will collect its likes, and the comments beneath it will fill up with people agreeing and sharing their own horror stories.
One TikTok post in the same vein, which lamented that "all the girls I know who got married lost their spark…", attracted more than 1,000 likes and hundreds of comments, and it is one of thousands of its kind.
Once you start noticing them, the messages are everywhere, and they arrive in a remarkable variety of voices: influencers ranting into ring lights, older women, divorced or simply regretful, calling marriage a scum, and a steady supply of people who walked out of their marriages and are, we are assured, now living their best lives.
Those who are still married get instructions to take precautions, to be smart and to prepare for the day it all ends, while any sign of trouble or conflict is stamped a "red flag" on sight. With that chorus playing on a loop, it begs the question; Is social media is fuelling strife in marriages?
Lucy Nduti, a counselling psychologist and marriage counsellor, says social media now features in many of the conflicts that reach her. Her main concern is the advice given on these platforms itself.
"Social media has created a huge space for relationship advice," she says. "Some of it is genuinely helpful, but not all of it comes from trained professionals."
The difficulty, as she sees it, lies in the way it is packaged. Complicated situations are squeezed into slogans short enough to fit over a video, such as "If they loved you, they would know" or "Leave immediately if your spouse does this", which are easy to remember, easy to share and just as easy to apply to the wrong situation.
Real marriages, Nduti explains, involve context, communication, history, attachment, boundaries and individual differences, none of which a slogan has room for.
A slogan cannot ask how long a couple have been together, what happened last year, or whether the behaviour behind the complaint is a settled habit or the residue of a bad week.
"Good advice should leave room for context, conversation and, where needed, professional support," she says.
The "red flag" habit shows the problem clearly enough. A warning sign is useful when it points to something serious, but once it is attached to every disagreement, it turns ordinary friction into evidence, so that a spouse who forgets an anniversary or goes quiet after a difficult day becomes a pattern, a warning and a reason to begin planning an exit.
"In the past, comparison was more likely to be with parents, relatives, neighbours or couples we personally knew," Nduti says. "Today, people can see hundreds of marriages through their phones, whether anniversaries, surprise gifts, romantic messages, holidays, beautiful homes and public declarations of love."
"We can end up comparing our private reality with someone else's carefully selected public moments. We see the anniversary trip or the beautiful family photograph, but not the financial pressure, disagreements, emotional distance or difficult conversations behind them."
The danger, she says, is the question this plants in a person's mind: "Why is my marriage not like that?"
"When couples spend meals or bedtime looking at screens rather than at each other, conversation, touch, affection and emotional reconnection can gradually become secondary," she says. "Social media does more than encourage comparison. It can quietly become the standard against which real marriages are judged."
Social media has created a huge space for relationship advice.
Photo credit: Shutterstock
Nduti is careful, though, not to cast the phone as the villain in every case. Some couples now interpret ordinary tensions as "social media problems", so that differences in communication style, unmet expectations, insecurity and old resentments get pinned on an app.
Her test is to ask, "If this problem were not happening on a phone, what would it be?"
The answer, she says, can point towards loneliness, insecurity, unresolved hurt, emotional neglect or poor communication.
"Sometimes social media has simply given an old problem a new address. Other times, it is simply where a deeper relationship problem has found a place to show itself."
She does not, however, regard the platforms as neutral, since they are designed to capture and keep our attention, which affects how present people are with those in front of them.
"A person who feels unseen at home may find it easier to seek affirmation online," she says, and someone more sensitive to rejection may read a delayed reply as a sign that something is wrong..
"So the platform is the accelerant, but the emotional need is usually the spark. If we only address the app, we miss the need. If we only address the need, we ignore the environment that makes it easier to act on it."
This is where bad advice does its greatest damage. A person who already feels unseen at home is likely to find a stream of confident voices telling them that the fault lies with their spouse, that they deserve better and that leaving is empowering.
Cosmas Mureti, a family and divorce lawyer at Mureti Cosmas and Co Advocates, observes that social media is increasingly appearing in marriage and divorce disputes.
"In all disputes before the court, the parties must present evidence to support their claims," he says, and social media posts may be used to support allegations of extramarital affairs, with adultery a ground for divorce in both Christian and civil marriages in Kenya.
His sharper warning is about what happens when a couple takes its quarrel into public view. Posting private messages and screenshots, or publicly discussing marital conflict, attracts third parties to weigh in on a problem that does not concern them.
"Third parties are catalysts of disharmony and may thwart any attempt by the couples to reconcile," he says.
The marriage may then become irretrievably broken down, which is itself a ground on which the offended party can seek a divorce. Mr Mureti considers it irresponsible for couples to wash their dirty linen in public.
In one case, a spouse sought divorce on the ground that the respondent had lied about her identity and marital status and had threatened to blackmail her by posting her intimate photographs on social media. In JMM v JMN [2016] eKLR, a party relied on social media posts to demonstrate cruelty and matrimonial discord, one spouse having been in continuous communication with another person on social media about the conduct of the partners.
The Data Protection Act and the Computer Misuse and Cybercrime Act are among the laws intended to enhance privacy in such situations.
One piece of online wisdom turns up with particular regularity, which is that a spouse who guards their phone must be hiding something, and both Mr Mureti and Ms Nduti take issue with it.
"Marriage is not a prison, and it does not deprive couples of their basic human rights, including the right to privacy," Mr Mureti says. "Most marital conflicts arise due to mistrust and a sense of insecurity. For instance, when a spouse prevents the other from accessing his or her phone, this may be interpreted as cheating or trying to hide evidence. This is not always the case; some people value their privacy, and they treat their phone as a private entity."
It behoves the other spouse, he says, to respect that decision, and a great marriage will thrive where a couple trust each other without limiting each other's rights and freedoms.
"There is nothing wrong with this kind of arrangement," he says of couples who have no objection to sharing phones and bank accounts.
Posting private messages and screenshots, or publicly discussing marital conflict, attracts third parties to weigh in on a problem that does not concern them.
Photo credit: Shutterstock
"Each family and/or couple is unique and peculiar in all aspects; therefore, couples should not be influenced by what other people are posting online as a perfect marriage."
"The aim is not surveillance or control," she says. "A spouse who demands every password out of suspicion is in a different situation from a couple who choose transparency because they trust each other and want to protect the marriage. Boundaries work best when they come from a shared desire for safety and closeness, not from fear."
She suggests couples talk through what they consider private and what can be shared, how they handle communication with former partners, where the boundaries lie around friendships outside the marriage, what they are comfortable posting about their children or their marriage, and when phones should be put away.
As a test of when ordinary use has turned harmful, she proposes a simple question: "Would I behave the same way if my spouse were sitting beside me?"
If the answer is no, it is worth pausing to ask why.
"When the behaviour becomes consistent and begins affecting trust, connection or intimacy, it deserves attention," she says.
Ahmad Amedi, an Islamic leader, approaches the subject from religious teaching. Islam commands people to seek knowledge, he says, but only from good and qualified teachers.
"Anything from social media that contradicts the teachings of the Qur'an and the authentic traditions of prophet Muhammad should be thrown out of the window."
"There are too many so called 'celebs' who use platforms such as tiktok, Instagram or facebook to spread bad influence, especially to the youth," he says.
"Fortunately, many on those platforms are more discerning and will easily single out nonsense like 'single and happy' or un-natural habits as rubbish. Those spouses who get bad influence that wreck marriages are few."
For couples who disagree, he recommends counselling and arbitration from good sources, noting that many mosques and Islamic communities have family resource centres and imams able to advise on reconciliation.
Where a marriage cannot be saved, he says, proper divorce options should be considered instead of spouses harming or killing one another in toxic marriages.
He also rejects the assumption running through much online commentary, that marriage ought to follow love.
"I just celebrated my 28th marriage anniversary this week. My wife and I were total strangers before we got married, and now we are the best of friends," he says.
His advice: "Do not marry for love and money. Marry to start a family, complement and complete your partner in marriage, whether monogamous or polygamous, marriage is the best family unit ever."
