Explaining Couples’ Meaning-Making Patterns of Extramarital Relationships in the Context of Social Media
Keywords:
Extramarital relationships, Social media, Online infidelity, Couples, Meaning-making, Thematic analysis, Marital commitmentAbstract
This study aimed to explain couples’ meaning-making patterns of extramarital relationships formed or perceived within social media contexts. This qualitative study was conducted using thematic analysis. The research population consisted of married couples living in Tehran who had directly or indirectly experienced social media-related extramarital relationships in their marital life. Participants were selected through purposive sampling based on predefined inclusion criteria, and recruitment continued until theoretical saturation was achieved. The final sample included 24 participants, comprising 12 women and 12 men from 12 couples. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews. Each interview lasted between 50 and 85 minutes, was audio-recorded with participants’ consent, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using NVivo software. To enhance trustworthiness, member checking, recoding, inter-coder agreement, analytic memoing, and thick description were employed. Data analysis led to the identification of five main categories: the fluidity of infidelity boundaries in digital spaces, the search for being seen and compensating for emotional deprivation, gradual normalization and moral compartmentalization, digital secrecy and crisis of trust, and the re-meaning of marital commitment after encountering online extramarital involvement. The findings indicated that social media-related extramarital relationships are often experienced not as sudden events but as gradual, ambiguous, emotional, and interpretive processes in which couples oscillate between meanings such as harmless joking, ordinary communication, emotional intimacy, emotional betrayal, and marital threat. Extramarital relationships in social media contexts should be understood not merely as sexual or communicative behaviors but as meaning-based, boundary-related, and relational phenomena. Understanding this issue requires simultaneous attention to emotional deprivation, couple-specific norms, digital secrecy, trust structures, and the redefinition of commitment in contemporary marital life.
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