Is it just ME?

Or should husbands be banned from Facebook?

FOR many of us, posting news and gossip about our day on Facebook has become the perfect endof-day wind down.

But it amazes me how many people, after a glass of wine in the evening, love to moan about a partner’s foibles for the amusement of their online friends — not caring that their husbands might be reading it. Are they mad?

I regularly witness a married couple I know littering Facebook with tit-for-tat spats of the I-wish-you’d-take-outthe-bins variety. It’s a bit like inviting bystanders into your private relationship.

The site is increasingly cited by divorce lawyers as evidence of ‘unreasonable behaviour’ — nearly a quarter of some 2,000 married Brits polled by a top law firm said they’d had at least one argument about social media, while one in seven had even considered divorce as a result.

Although my partner and I effectively live in each other’s pockets (we often work at home, surrounded by our four sons, two each from our previous relationships), we would never be Facebook friends. I don’t want, or need, to know every aspect of his interior life. He’s as entitled to his emotional hinterland as I am to mine.

I’m glad I didn’t have to ‘explain’ a nostalgic online chat between me and my one-time boyfriend and our mates of 35 years ago.

Around six months ago, I also un-friended my ex. While relations are usually cordial, we’re not quite friends in real life, we’re co-parents — and that’s a relationship which should always be conducted away from the public gaze.

I have friends who won’t even let their husbands near Facebook, where they confess cheerfully to hangovers, arguments and crushes.

Honesty in relationships is vital, but having a space to be oneself, among friends, is as important. We should all think twice before automatically ‘friending’ the ones we love.

It’s a bit like inviting bystanders to witness a private row about taking the bins out