Research says Couples who communicate on Facebook have less satisfying relationships

Couples who communicate using Facebook could be putting a strain on their relationship, researchers have warned.

Oxford University psychologists found husbands and wives who kept in touch using social media had less satisfying marriages.

They surveyed the types of social media used by 3,500 couples. These included Facebook, emails, texts, tweets and instant messages.

Those using more than five different channels to communicate with their loved one had a 14 per cent drop in average relationship satisfaction.

Dr Bernie Hogan, from Oxford Internet Institute, suggested marital disharmony could be triggered by the stress and time pressure of constantly maintaining so many different threads of communication.

He said: ‘Using these media is great in moderation. But more is not necessarily better.

‘We need to walk back from the idea that more communication by more media is a good thing.

‘We have been drunk on new media over the past ten years. Now we realise that its absence is bad, but overuse is also bad.

‘It’s important to be accessible without being overbearing’

Britons spend an estimated 62 million hours each day on Facebook and Twitter, according to a new survey on social media habits

The poll, for the bank firstdirect suggests that around 34 million hours are spent on Facebook each day, with a further 28 million hours on Twitter.

And almost a third (30%) of the UK’s 33 million Facebook users are on the network for at least an hour a day, with 13% spending at least two hours on Facebook each day.