It has never been easier to see into other people’s lives. We create a carefully curated picture of our own lives on social media, often masking the negative things we endure and highlighting the positive.
It can be easy to forget that other people are doing the exact same thing. We see our friends and our families portraying the perfect picture of their relationships, and assume that their lives and relationships are really that perfect. It can be tempting and easy to compare that perfect image to our own lives and relationships and feel sad about our own realities.
What is social comparison?
This process of comparing our relationships to other people’s relationships is called social comparison. Social comparisons aren’t unique to the age of social media, but they are more prevalent and potentially less accurate. This process occurs automatically and unintentionally when we view another person’s social media posts, meaning that it's really hard to avoid if you don’t realize it is happening.
Social comparisons happen in two ways. We can either compare our relationship to another relationship that we feel is better than our own (upward comparison) or to a relationship that we feel is worse than our own (downward comparison). It makes sense that when we compare our relationships to others that are worse than our own, it can help make us feel pretty good about ourselves. However, comparing ourselves to a relationship that is better than our own can make us feel self-conscious or unsure about our own relationships.
Since social media is so heavily curated to only show the best sides of ourselves and our relationships, people who browse social media more frequently are more likely to make upward comparisons to others. This can be really damaging to our self-esteem and how satisfied we are in our own relationship. Research has found that people who spend a lot of time on...
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