SMS Breaks up Marriages in Kenya
Allafrica.com has reported that cell phones are assisting in the divorce rate amongst couples. This conclusion is based upon the results of an opinion poll commissioned by the Sunday Nation that revealed that, for many couples, spying on each other has become a fulltime preoccupation. The poll shows that 47.3 percent of the respondents have been actively engaged in domestic espionage in the last three months and that 42.8 percent of the respondents revealed they secretly read their partners SMS messages regularly.
According to psychologists, marriage counselors, and the church, marriages have been put to the test by this tendency of a spouse to scroll through their partner’s messages. Of course, there’s nothing to worry about if there’s nothing risqué on the phone to begin with but the increase of cell phones in Africa have also seemingly increased the trend of casual affairs. Where as before, households were only equipped with landlines and thus lacked the amount of privacy individual cell phones offer, people may have been more hesitant to pursue an affair in the first place. With the cell phone comes privacy, with privacy comes potential secrecy and once these secrets are discovered, disaster may ensue.
