"Fish Farming": The Link Between Pre-romantic Relationship Behavior and Social Media Use

Abstract

Social media has greatly involved aspects of peoples lives. Young people are active users of social media, and their social interactions have shown some striking new phenomena on social media. When it comes to romantic connections on social media, the practice of aggressively starting romantic relationships hints but delaying or not formally confirming a romantic relationship seems to be on the rise. This study aims to investigate if the use of social media contributed to the creation of such a phenomenon using empirical methodologies. In order to evaluate the hypothesis, this study employs the independence test and the correlation test. The results show that, while social media use is associated with the behavior of starting a romantic connection, it also has a positive link with the behavior of continuing a romantic relationship. In short, it is counterintuitive that social media use cannot be shown to be positively correlated with initiating but not maintaining a romantic relationship. Therefore, this paper looks forward to future research to further test whether the research conclusions of this paper apply the research on a single social media.