Can a video game ruin your marriage?

Fortnite, an online video game, is responsible for the collapse of the institution of marriage. Or, so say publicists hired by a firm called Divorce Online, whose recent press release cites 200 petitions to divorce in the last year where “addiction to Fortnite and other digital games” was listed as the cause of breakdown in the union.

If you have heard this already, it is because the press release has been reported as news by every major paper and TV station in the world, taken up as sensational evidence of Fornite’s power and reach. This game must be addictive if it’s capable of sabotaging relationships. Be wary of these pernicious little online shooters. No family, we’re cautioned, is safe.

It’s reassuring to believe a video game may be powerful enough to ruin a marriage. It confirms certain suspicions about the menace they present: games seem mysterious and drug-like, strange threats under whose influence we might slip if our guard falls. More importantly, it confirms ideas about relationships — about their precariousness and susceptibility to attack, about how easily a happy romance can be destroyed. It’s comforting to imagine that something as painful and disastrous as divorce could be chalked up to a few too many hours on the couch rather than, say, radical personal failings or irredeemable defects of character. That lets us off the hook. Marriage was hard, and separation was inevitable — thanks not to irreconcilable differences but to a video game.

Everything would have been just fine, were it not for Fortnite. Or perhaps not.

The truth is, Fortnite is not responsible for the end of any marriages. Indeed, no one external factor can possibly be to blame. The husband who spends 18 hours a day in front of the television, building towers and sniping enemies from afar, is not, safe to assume, disposed to being a supportive, active partner; Fortnite may be what he cares about at the moment, but what matters more is how little he cares for his wife.

Who are we to throw up our hands and insist it’s out of our control? No game is that irresistible. People do not get addicted to a video game because the game is too good. People get addicted to a video game because they have depression, or anxiety, or are otherwise inclined to seek distraction and refuge away from their life and their loved ones. The refuge could just as well be books or sitcoms or college basketball.

Do not blame Fortnite. It doesn’t have the power to ruin a relationship. Look closer, look deeper. Like any disease, you have to fight not the symptoms, but the cause.