I love social media. It’s been incredibly kind to me. I want to write songs about it. I want to bring it to the eighth grade winter formal and slow dance to Milli Vanilli’s “Blame it on the Rain.”

It’s a tremendous set of tools whose ability to provide hope and change is only matched in strength by its ability to wreck lives when misused.

Surveying the carnage of friends’ marriages and struggles in my own, it was not difficult to find three perfectly easy ways you can wreck your marriage with social media. There are a million ways perhaps, not just three, but a post with a million points would take a really long time to write and probably end up being pretty boring with points 800,001-900,000 just being completely mailed in and weak. So let’s stick with 3.

Here they are:

3 perfectly easy ways to wreck your marriage with social media.

1. Add a 3rd party to the mix.
“Me, you and the iPhone doesn’t equal ‘spending time together.’” My wife has said that to me often. She’s also said, “I didn’t come sit outside with you so that I could talk to the top of your head while you stare at your iPhone.” She’s right. I have a really hard time plugging into our conversations when I’m plugged into a dozen others with strangers via my iPhone and social media. The funny thing is that if I looked at it the right way, I’d never do it. If we were sitting in the yard together in Adirondack chairs and cars full of strangers were streaming by us down the street, I’d never say to her, “I love you, but I’m going to focus on yelling random things at those people who are driving by. I don’t know them, I might never see them again, but those are the folks I want to focus on right now. They’re more important than you.” Don’t let your smartphone make you dumb.

2. Find someone who “gets you.”
Last Saturday at the Quitter Conference someone asked me an awesome question. To the best of my recollection, this is what they said, “Does your wife read everything you write? My husband isn’t a writer and it’s hard to get him engaged with the things I’m writing and excited about.” Jenny doesn’t read everything I write, but she reads a lot of it. A few years ago we learned something though. Writing, talking about advertising and ideas, branding, etc., those things don’t fire her up in the same exact way they fire me up. And that’s great! She’s a different person than I am, and doesn’t have to mirror my passions and feelings in the exact same way I feel them. But the danger is that if you think your spouse should, and they don’t, you often go looking for someone who will. You have a passion for music. You love talking about lyrics and the way a certain concert or video made you feel. And when you’re husband doesn’t share that, you find someone online who does. It starts by talking about music and how much you love it. And then despite your best attempts to prevent it, big, unexpected seeds of an emotional affair are planted.

If it goes on long enough, you end up saying what every friend of mine who has had an affair eventually says, “This person gets me! They understand me!” How do you prevent that? I’m not sure. How do I? I’ll tell you. I share my passions with Jenny. I share everything with her, but I also have a few friends that will geek out with me on branding. I have breakfast with Stephen Brewster and we’ll talk about the genius of Jay-Z or how to grow a blog community or a million other things. Brewster gets me. As my friend! As a guy walking through life with me, engaged in the same interests I have. I don’t put that unbearable pressure on Jenny. I don’t hold her responsible to replicate every passion I have and react to my interests with a fake sense of enthusiasm, no more than she expects me to understand why she loves engaging with Angie Smith and Heather Whittaker about the passions of hosting parties. Jenny doesn’t have to be me. She gets to be Jenny and bring her own passion and heart and uniqueness to the marriage.

3. Be someone else online.
It’s so easy to suffer from “Digital Business Traveler Syndrome” or DBTS. Do you know why so many people make so many mistakes when they go on business trips? Because the rules of home don’t apply when they’re on the road. There’s a home me and a road me. That’s why the Las Vegas tagline is so depressingly perfect, “What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.” We hit the road and think we’re two different people. The same thing happens sometimes when we hit social media. We’ll flirt in ways we wouldn’t flirt in “real life.” We’ll blog things we’d never say to someone’s face. We’ll tweet things or post things on facebook that we’d never say in our “offline” life. It’s exhausting to be two people. It’s so tiring to keep our different personalities separated, but we still do it. And when you divide yourself that way, you end up hiding and eventually doing things you never imagined yourself doing when you walked down the aisle with your husband or wife.

My hope is that you saw all three of those ways and laughed, laughed, laughed. You’ve known about those possible traps for years and my information is dated and ridiculous. But if you didn’t and you’re walking unchecked into the myriad of opportunities social media offers you to wreck your marriage, be careful.