Relationship Guides May Not Help, But Social Media Forces These 12 Questions on You | 100 Big Questions About Life

No intimate relationship means 100 percent honesty, and phones and the internet have made that even more complicated.

A while back, the film Perfect Strangers took up a subject Feng Xiaogang first raised in Cell Phone: once this little gadget arrived, what solid challenges did it pose to the relationships humans believe are intimate?

The phone has simply made the internet part of the air you breathe. In the opening entry of her "New Romance" column in Huck Magazine, which follows cultural change, Emily Reynolds writes that under the internet's influence every form of our relationships has changed in strange ways — or, put another way, has warped subtly, in one direction or another.

On one hand, what we can express through social networks has grown more complex, and more of our talking has moved online. On the other, people have grown used to communicating in text and simple pictures.

"Expression" itself is now hard to sum up in a few words. It used to mean speaking, writing, or taking some concrete action. Now the new ways of trying to make the other person understand what you mean include, but are not limited to: blocking them, marking them as a Special Follow, swapping Douban IDs, setting up a Moments group just for them, posting a photo of the two of you where all your friends can see it (with a particular caption or emoji), switching your status to "in a relationship" on Weibo or Facebook, going invisible, or being invisible to everyone but them.

So a bestselling book on the art of social scheming would now have to keep up with the times and explain why doing A instead of B is what set off the argument (along with every other little mind game like it). Since the same act means different things to different people, that gap in interpretation has become a routine source of everyday misunderstanding.

The psychologist Sharon Brehm, in her book Intimate Relationships, defines such a relationship as one that "differs from other relationships in six respects: knowledge, caring, interdependence, mutuality, trust, and commitment." But no intimate relationship means 100 percent honesty and full information-sharing. Whether out of betrayal, a wish to spare the other person worry, or simply a fear of causing misunderstanding and a sense that it is easier not to raise something, people always hold back information from their partner.

With that in mind, QDaily Research Lab ran an open-ended survey titled "What extra trouble has social media caused in your intimate relationships?" From that survey and other everyday observation, we found that in this era people's intimate relationships — romantic ones in particular — may face 12 new challenges brought by social media.

The New York Times once published "36 Questions That Determine Whether You Should Break Up With Someone," and of course you have heard all the lists of "things you must agree on with your partner before you marry." People no longer mind putting the unpleasant things on the table first, to head off bigger trouble later.

Below are our small observations on the unpredictable ways intimate relationships are shifting.

The Same Person Can Behave Completely Differently Online and Offline

1. In the early days, how should you talk when you're texting?

2. When you can't see each other, how do you read the small details to work out what someone really means?

3. Once you go from talking mostly online to talking mostly in person, how do you switch gears?

Compared with somewhat dramatic scenarios like "liking your ex's posts on Moments or Weibo more than once" or "swearing you trust them, then sneaking a look the moment their phone screen lights up," we found that what troubles young people most, and most often, is simply that online and offline feel too unlike each other. Twice as many people agreed with "we chat away happily online, then it's awkward in person" as picked the second-most-popular option. The small frustrations below can even make you wonder: if the internet alone keeps people in touch and provides a certain amount of emotional support, how much does it really matter to move from chatting online to sharing the daily grind of a life together?

• There are no emoji stickers in real life, so you can't fully express how you feel;
• My boyfriend and I spent six months in different countries and did fine on WeChat and FaceTime, then once we were actually together we fought four days straight — he even said he'd gotten used to being single?! Might as well raise a Travel Frog;
• I thought we were close enough that I could open up about past relationships and talk about the future over text, and then I found out… they didn't think we were close at all;
• If your partner will talk by text and only by text, does that mean they're dodging emotional expression? Doesn't it feel cold?
• Something as big as a confession, or even a proposal, done by text, and they say they're just shy — I think it means they don't care and were only testing the waters;
• You get to the subway station on a date and can't find each other, and whether to keep sending your location on WeChat or just call right away can set off a small fight.

Just as wearing, day to day, is having to keep "translating" the other person's behavior online. In another survey we ran — "In the early days, what small details tell you someone likes you?" — some of the answers can roughly be translated as "I'm interested in you":

• Replying to messages instantly most of the time;
• Texting after the first date to say they got home safe, and starting a new topic;
• The more specific and subtle ones: mid-conversation they say they're off to shower / eat / work late, and a while later message back, "I'm back."

The Endlessly Argued, Never-Settled Question of Privacy Boundaries

4. So should you actually swap phone unlock codes and social media passwords with your partner?

According to a survey Kaspersky Lab ran across several countries early this year, more than half of couples can get into each other's phones with a password or fingerprint. But in our own survey, "Even inside an intimate relationship, where do you still want to stay independent?", nearly 50,000 responses told us that independence matters so much that people are not necessarily straight with each other about their secrets. Being able to unlock each other's phones is already a big step, never mind sharing WeChat and Weibo passwords — far riskier than telling each other your bank card PIN once was.

So most relationship experts also say "think it over carefully." Beyond the crisis of trust it can set off, their reasons for not endorsing that much transparency between couples include the safety and privacy risks both sides face after a breakup.

Our follow-up survey found that, besides sharing passwords as an important way for couples to show trust, new technology shapes how couples handle data privacy too — "we just bought a phone that reads fingerprints, so why not register each other's." And taking that step doesn't always come from the relationship moving forward. It can start with a fight or a fit of pique: "since you don't trust me, let's just tell each other our passwords and see who's really in the wrong." Others believe that "grown-up relationships don't need anything as childish as swapping phone passwords (we all know perfectly well what's buried in there) — that's what high schoolers do."

Dealings With Other People Cause More Misunderstandings Now

5. Does "cheating" need to be redefined?

6. How do you cut down on the misunderstandings social media causes?

A BBC report defined micro-cheating as "acts within a relationship that look small but show that a person has begun to focus, in body and mind, on someone other than their current partner." The BBC asked several relationship experts to list possible micro-cheating scenarios: staying in touch with an ex without your partner's knowledge, always liking the same person's posts on social media (especially after dark), keeping up a platonic friendship online, and not deleting your profile on a dating site.

For some people, any of these is plenty to trigger a fight, or even a breakup. Beyond them, our survey "In a relationship or a friendship, what signs have you spotted that the other person is pulling away?" turned up a few more sparks that can set off misunderstandings:

• They have a secret alt account they never told me about;
• They keep bringing up things from before we were together on social media;
• A photo of them alone with someone else shows up on social media;
• We'd been cheering each other on through the job hunt, and today I learn from Moments that they already got the offer? Even when I see a funny post online, I screenshot it and send it to you before I put it on Moments.

Even "which emoji, sent in a chat, counts as flirting" can be read completely differently by two people in a couple. One possible fix is to spend more time talking it out and learning how your partner sees these subtle things.

And here is a genuinely troubling question: with social media around, is a lie easier to catch, or harder?

The Definition of "Caring About Me" Has Changed

7. How do you actually show someone you care?

How do people judge whether someone cares about them now? The standards from before social media — "what did you buy me," "what did you do for me" — still count, of course, but caring is now tied more closely to the phone, as in "do you always reply to my WeChat messages instantly?" A half-hour wait for a reply is enough on its own to make a relationship feel exhausting, even disillusioning.

How people show they care naturally differs a little at different stages of a relationship, and opinions vary. But going by the standards people in our survey used to gauge caring, if your partner feels you don't care anymore, you can run down this list for the likely reason:

• Replying to WeChat instantly most of the time;
• Finishing one topic before starting another;
• Putting the phone face down on the table when you eat together;
• Changing their Facebook or Weibo status to "in a relationship" soon after you started dating;
• Posting to Moments to introduce me to their friends;
• Regularly posting photos of me on the social networks they use.

What to Post About Your Own Relationship Is Also a Question

8. Should you still show off your relationship online?

9. What's appropriate to post about your relationship status?

People can argue for a while over whether to show off a relationship on social media at all, never mind the fine points: a photo of the two of you or one from meeting the parents; whether blocking an ex-girlfriend avoids trouble or means you have something to hide; which particular moments are worth posting.

As with the topics above, different choices produce different consequences because each side reads "what this means" differently. Besides the big move of posting nothing at all, which saves a lot of explaining, you might also draw a few golden rules from repeated trial and error: don't post if you've only just met, or if you know you switch dating partners often; don't post if the photo looks bad; be careful if the two of you share a lot of mutual friends; and don't forget the option of setting Moments to show only the last three days.

Even Breaking Up Means Handling a Lot of Social Media Business

10. What's the better way to say you want to break up?

11. How do you clear away your traces on social media efficiently?

12. After a breakup, what other trouble can social media cause?

In our survey, the number of people who broke up over WeChat was second only to those who did it face to face, and higher than those who did it by phone. Breaking up in person looks considered and serious; text delivered from a distance carries its own air of "I've resolved never to see you again." But because people read these things differently, judging how someone chose to break up can turn into the last fight of a relationship.

Afterwards, "deleting posts, photos and chat logs, clearing out every digital trace of the other person" has become one of the rituals most likely to help you move on. If you can't finish the job right away, changing your Weibo relationship status back to single is the simplest, most direct move.

Finally, we've pulled together the social media parts of "breakup etiquette" for your reference:

• Information travels faster all the time, so it matters more and more to stick to the facts and not invent things that never happened in order to smear the other person;
• You're allowed to be sad, but try not to play the victim on social media, or you may lose a lot of friends on top of your partner;
• If you've given up on the relationship, be the one to say so, rather than dodging the role of the bad guy by pulling away and going cold until the other person has to say it first — but think it through before you talk to them, instead of using "let's break up" as a threat at every turn, which is part of why a breakup by text goes down badly;
• If you can't part on good terms, then leave each other's lives cleanly after the breakup, the virtual world included.

100 Big Questions About Life is a newly spun-off column about the small but hugely important workings of contemporary life — the kind of topic you raise with friends by saying, "hey, have you noticed lately…" Follow along.

Cover images from:

iStock © TataGD, a still from the film Perfect Strangers, iStock © MHJ; in-body images from Giphy © Disney