The Internet Is Destroying Relationships (Here’s the Data to Prove It)

The internet is destroying modern relationships and we have the data to prove it. Welcome back to the ManTalks Show, Connor Beaton here, and you're probably thinking to yourself, yeah, buddy, I know. And, and look, I get it, I get it. Maybe I'm not saying anything that's new to you, but this data and this research that I came across is new. At least it was new to me. I found it quite surprising and shocking. I haven't seen anybody talk about this and I've looked at a lot of the relationship data, but I found this to be quite interesting because it's indicative of one fundamental core problem in modern relationships that you absolutely need to be aware of if you want to develop a healthy, robust, connected, securely attached relationship. If you care about your relationship, then this video is for you. Whether you're single or not, whether you want a relationship in the future, um, or you're in a relationship now, this one thing is going to make a difference. So Let's dive in. Modern relationships, it's probably on your radar. It feels like they have become more weak and more fragile, and they are falling apart faster than IKEA furniture that you've tried to put together without the instructions, right? Which I might have been guilty of in the past. But anyway, why is this? We can point to all of the studies, right? The, the dating apps, the social media, you know, the external influence that happens. Well, somebody dug into some very interesting human data and they compiled arguably the largest data sample possible from peer advice. And they went on to Reddit. They went specifically to the subreddit Relationship Advice. And in this subreddit, there are over— in the last 16 years since 2010, there's over 5 million posts, meaning 5 million people have gone into that subreddit and have said, hey, I have a relationship question, I have a relationship problem. What do you think I should do? Because this subreddit is specifically for you to go and say, here's my problem, I want your advice. And in this subreddit, of those 5 million posts, there are 52 million comments, okay? 52 million. So that means that over the course of the last, you know, 15, 16 years, there are millions and millions and millions of people that have gone in there and shared their thoughts, their insight. And this person compiled all of that data. The data looked at the most common responses from people. And now the interesting thing is that these people that are in there giving advice, and I've been in there before, I've looked at it, it's not all just rando keyboard warriors, right? There's sometimes therapists, coaches, psychologists will go in there and they'll share their thoughts. So it's not all random people, but Well, you know, it's still people. So it sampled over 1.1 million comments and the findings were pretty shocking. So I'm going to put up the graphic here so that you can look at the graph. And the findings looked at the responses from the people and broke them down into categories. And the biggest one that stood out to me was how often people were told to leave, to break up, to divorce. From 2010, 30% in 2010, the responses, 30% of the time, people were hearing leave, divorce, breakup. And in 2025, it skyrocketed to 50%. So if you went in there and you posted, "Hey, I have this relationship problem. What do you think I should do?" 50% of the comments would be either directly or indirectly telling you that you should leave. Communicate, AKA have a conversation, talk to your significant other about this, dropped from 22% down to 14%. Compromise collapsed from an already measly 7% to 3%. And give them space or just give it time, you know, let it breathe for a while, let yourself calm down, let yourself regulate, fell from 25% down to 13%. So notice the trend, every category, Every category that requires you to be patient, every category that is recommending patience, regulation, slowing down, giving time to understand and assess, all of those dropped over the last few years. And the one category that did, uh, grow faster actually than leave or break up was seek therapy, or as Michael Jordan would say, get help. So that went up from 1% to 6%. And, you know, this forum is kind of understanding that they can say, that's above my pay grade, I don't know how to answer that, you should ask a professional, you should ask an expert. And here's what I think is alarming, okay? In the age of AI, modern AI data is being trained on scraping all of these different forums, scraping, you know, education advice, educational tech, texts, understanding frameworks and modalities like cognitive behavioral therapy and ACT and, you know, whatever else it is, Jungian analysis. It's being trained on all of those different models, but it's also being trained on forums like this. And the interesting thing is if you just trained an LLM, a large language model, on this forum, it would recommend breaking up the vast majority of the time, you know, probably half the time, if not a little bit more or a little bit less. But it would recommend that you leave half the time. And this, I think, is indicative of the cultural conversation that has changed around relationships. And it has started to weaken the individual and the couple's ability to move through hardship, right? And we've seen this. And I think what this really says, what this data really says about human relationships, is that we've become, increasingly fragile because we have outsourced the help, the resources to a culture, to a society, to people who are so wildly unequipped to give us feedback, or they've bought into this notion that disagreement equals exit. Disagreement means relational death. If you and I disagree, then we can no longer be in relationship. And this has continued to elevate more and more and more and more. The more turmoil you have socially, the more turmoil and transition and chaos you have in a transitional period, the more that the individual psyche looks for assurance, it looks for stability. So the big thing that I want you to know is that when you look out at the world, when you look at the geopolitics, when you watch the news, when you scroll through social media, if what you see is a rise in uncertainty, which by the way, the Global Uncertainty Index is at its all-time high, higher than even during the Cold War, right? So the Global Uncertainty Index is higher than it's ever been before. So if you look out at the world and you see mass amounts of chaos, uncertainty, big transitions at a geopolitical level, you don't know what's going to happen. Here's what I want you to know. In those moments, your individual psyche will search for certainty. Your brain is a pattern recognition machine. And when your brain cannot figure out what outcome is going to happen or what's likely to happen, or it finds itself in a moment of chaos and transition, it's going to look for certainty. And so you treat relationships no different. The average person, when you go in, you date, you're married, you treat your relationship the same way. When uncertainty arises, you look for the known, you look for the assuredness. And what a lot of people turn to is, well, the advice that I'm given, the advice that I'm chronically inundated with by social media and AI and subreddits and the like is just leave, just break up, right? We've all seen the celebratory divorce posts. We've all seen the, you know, selfies from the divorce court of people celebrating the end of their marriage. And look, I wanna make it clear before I go any further, I'm not advocating for staying in something that's toxic or unhealthy or abusive. Of course, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that we have lost the ability to do one specific thing that is undeniably, unequivocally research-backed needed for your relationship to work. And it says follows, the quality of your relationship will be determined by your ability, by your ability and the other person's ability to go through hardship and hard shit together. That is what will make or break a relationship. And that means sometimes letting it rest, giving it space, not trying to talk about it incessantly, not harping on the other person every single time that they do that thing that annoys you or agitates you, right? Letting it go is actually sometimes a necessary tool in a relationship. Communicating needs, wants, how you were hurt, you actually have to communicate. So those are all examples of doing something hard, right? Apologizing might be doing something hard. Admitting that you were wrong might be doing something hard. Admitting or communicating that there's something that you need and want in the relationship is likely going to create some type of hardship for you or the relationship. And then seeking to understand why your significant other is so hurt, so frustrated, so upset might also be hardship. All right, guys, really quick aside. First off, thank you so much for tuning in to the show and to the channel. If you are wanting to go deeper, if you're a man that's working on himself in some way, shape, or form, you're wanting to be more self-led, you want to trust yourself more, you want to have a deeper level of self-worth, or maybe you're looking to improve your relationship, then I encourage you to check out the Man Talks Alliance. You can go to mantalks.com/alliance. We have over 1,000 men in this incredible community from around the world, men who are just like you, working to better themselves, to be a better husband, a better father, a better leader, in your own life. So check it out, mantalks.com/alliance. So this is the tool, and we can see this, right? When you look at the research by the people like the Gottmans, Dr. John Gottman, what it really shows is that the quality of your relationship, they can determine whether or not a relationship is going to end. You've probably heard this. I'm gonna say it anyway. They can determine whether your relationship will end in the next 5 years by listening to your conversation with your significant other and determining with 92% accuracy whether that relationship will last the next 5 years or not. What are they looking for? They're looking for the— they're looking for how resilient your relationship is based off of your communication, based off of how do you and your significant other interact when things are tough? When— how do you go through hardship? How do you go through conflict? How do you disagree? Those things are going to make or break your relationship. But we've entered into a culture that says life's too short to stay in something that's not working or where something's missing. And that has become a gateway into, I actually don't know how to make a relationship work. And we've swung the pendulum from, I have, I have no choice but to stay in this relationship. I have to stay in the relationship. I can't get divorced, or I have to stay for duty and honor's sake, to I'm going to ghost your ass at the first sign of disagreement. And that has completely— or I'm going to use interrogation techniques on our first date to determine whether or not you're a viable fit for me. And, you know, it destroys, it collapses relationship. We've commoditized relationships. We've made intimacy so cheap that it's almost worthless. And we've almost entirely destroyed the concept of romanticism, right? Men who want a romantic life or a romantic relationship, they're beta cucks. And women who want romance, you know, they've been indoctrinated by the patriarchy or what have you. And so, so many people have lost the willingness to even engage in the dance of building trust, which requires you to go through a little bit of hardship. And instead, they show up into a relationship with a never-ending list of red flags that they need to look out for. And at the first whiff of any of those, the relationship collapses. And so the truth is that long-term, as far as I can see it, after working with so many couples, and my wife's one of the, you know, top marriage and family therapists in the country, she's worked with, she's done 30,000 hours of couples work, we work with couples together. After working with so many couples who I can tell you, is that relationships take work, they take effort, they can be confronting at times. And the relationships that I have seen that not only work and not only survive, but thrive, where the couple has a really deep love, functional relationship, are the ones where the couples don't avoid the hardship. They communicate that they're going to walk through it together. And so it's not that we want to run or turn away or separate as soon as things get hard. It's actually that we want to stay in that, but we want to stay in it in a way that maybe is different. I think that so many people in our modern times are either ejecting because they can't stay in the hardship, or they're using the same approach and same tactic to try and move through that conflict or that hardship. And you have to be willing to adjust. So the big message here is choose someone that you want to go through hardship and hard shit with. Choose someone that you respect who goes through hardship with you, even though sometimes they might, you know, do things a way that you don't like. Like sometimes my wife and I will go through some disagreement or we'll have some conflict show up in our marriage or our relationship. We'll disagree on something. And sometimes, you know, I'm like, I don't— I don't really like sometimes the way that I show up. And then there's times where I'm like, I don't really like the way that you show up, but there's no one else that I would rather go through that hardship, that disagreement, that conflict with, because I know that the two of us can get through it. I know that we will work it out. I know that the two of us have the same willingness to address those things, to talk about those things, to let them rest for a period of time, when the conversation's not getting anywhere, and that we're willing to stay in the sorting it out. And I think that so many people have either become hopeless and helpless in relationships, that at the first sign of disagreement, they're like, "Oh, look, here's another one. All men are broken, all women are dysfunctional. I'm never gonna make this work." And they fall back into this victim mindset, or they show up prescripted thinking that the relationship isn't going to work. And so at the first sign of any type of breakdown, any type of not getting their needs met, it's a confirmation bias, right? See, look, men are this way, women are this way, relationships are this way, I'm out. And so at the end of the day, this one thing, communicating with your partner and saying, hey, here's what really matters to me, like almost above anything else, Yeah, great sex, that's great. Healthy communication, super important. Going on adventures together, really important. Building a life together, I want that. Here's what's really important based on what I know, okay? Based on what I know. Choosing somebody and agreeing together that you are going to be willing to do the work to go through hardship, to go through disagreement, and to continue to come back to the table and voice your resentments and voice your contempts and voice your frustrations and be willing to do your individual part to let those things go, to heal them, to move past them, to forgive because of them. Because again, here's what the data shows outside of this one, outside of this one piece. Resentment is corrosive for intimacy and romance and love. Resentment is corrosive. It will eat away at the structure of your love, and it will eat away at the structure, at the actual foundation of the relationship itself. And I think what's challenging is that so many people are entering into relationships with previous resentments or fears of intimacy, And as soon as dysfunction, and maybe not even dysfunction, as soon as disagreement, as soon as distance, as soon as conflict starts to show up, there's a fragility that emerges within that individual and the relationship. And my insight for you, my hope for you is that you bring relational resiliency. Now, that doesn't mean that you stay in something that's toxic. It doesn't mean that you stay in something that's abusive. Of course, get out of those things, right? If it's abusive, get out, of course, plain and simple. But I think that we need to do a better job of learning how to stay in the breakdown of our relationship, in the breakdown of our life. And I'll leave you this last piece. In Jungian psychology and in alchemy, there's something called the negredo, and it's the blackening, and it's the period psychologically where you go through a kind of decay, where things fall apart, where things start to break down, things don't work very well. You know, some in spiritual texts, they call this the dark night of the soul, etc. And in our Western culture, this— and it's associated with death, right? The Nigredo is associated with death. It's the dying off of things. In our Western culture, we're very death-phobic, we're very Nigredo-phobic. And so we never actually allow things to to be messy, to begin to fall apart, to begin to decay, and learn the wisdom in that decay, in that falling apart. And if you're in a long-term relationship, the truth is that you're going to go through many decay periods. You're going to go through many periods where the relationship becomes stretched, where the connection becomes stretched, where things start to break apart. And the way in which you loved each other, you communicated, you made love, you interacted, you adventured changes. And that's the natural cycle of life, right? There's like the 7-year curse in a relationship. When you look at the divorce data and the breakup data, what you'll see is that around the 7-year mark, it's very common that that's where separation, that's where divorce happens. And that's usually for a number of reasons. But there's a cycle that happens relationally. And what we need is not just somebody that we can go through the status quo with, and not with somebody that we can just go through the ascension with when things are great and things are wonderful and you're exploring and adventuring and having great sex and whatever it is, drinking good wine if you drink, but somebody that you can go through the hard times with. And I think that's what most of us are looking for as people. Most people, when I talk to them, what they're really hurting in, what they're really suffering and lacking in is that they are craving and deeply longing for somebody to at least stand by their side as they go through this negredo, as they go through the hard time. Now, the challenge is that your relationship will go through that. Your relationship unequivocally will go through that. It doesn't matter how amazing it is, doesn't matter how great your sex life is and how good the communication is. At some point in your relationship, if you are together long enough, it's going to go through a bear market. It's going to have a bear market at some point. And the problem in our society, to wrap this all up, is that we have forgot to teach people how to go through that relational bear market together, how to go through that relational downturn together and come out of it. Some people stay in there for years and years and years and years and years doing the same shit in the same cycle, and they feel stuck. And that's what leads to the death of a relationship. And some people, as soon as it starts to bottom out, they get out. And so we have to learn how to move through this relational space more effectively. So thank you so much for tuning in. Share your thoughts below. Share this with your significant other. Share this with somebody in your life that you think would enjoy it. Man it forward. And as always, until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.