The social media age

This is love in the social media age. Candlelight dinner, fine wine, degustation, a lover's face scrunched over a phone screen live-tweeting brainfarts about the relationship to largely uninterested skim-readers. We love our partners, we as a matter of fact do, however we as well love the sugar rush of constant cyber-stimulation, and it is causing us to behave very badly to all intents and purposes. I watch people on Twitter flirting, fawning and having their heads turned by nameless avatars. I see people broadcasting the bleak lows of their marriages, I see precious anniversary and birthday gifts chosen by Twitter "committee". I have friends who've synced their laptops and phones to update simultaneously, and now arrive at lunch carting rucksacks of electrical equipment, such is their terror a partner might read a direct message they shouldn't.

Punch-up at the funeral

I know people who have "legacy-strategy" in place to wipe all their social network sites within two hours of their accidental death so as to avoid a punch-up at the funeral. Evidently, I smirk watching this chaos unfold, from my lofty moral vantage as a woman checking Twitter dozens of times a day, a woman who often presents her husband with meals consisting of fridge remnants as I'm too busy fannying about on the internet to cook or shop. Maybe for any of us to stay loved and in love, we need to accept some uncomfortable truths about relationships and social networking. Things just as:

Twitter and the warm "love" of a thousand nameless avatars often feels much more rewarding. Your Twitter buddies expect nothing of you except the odd grunt about the Olympic ticketing procedure or the occasional YouTube link of a Russian cat trying to get into a small box. Twitter would never pass you a phone and make you listen to an in-law talking about their gall bladder. Twitter would never ask you to spend Saturday wiping a child's bum, at the time queueing for the municipal tip.

The internet

You can't stop your partner being on the internet, it makes you look like a weirdo. Access to the web to most people feels like a basic human right. Deny your partner a Facebook or Twitter account if you want, however don't snivel when people are swirling their fingers round their ears at talk of your name. Demanding a full password amnesty makes you look unhinged, too. All in all, you can set rules about where your real lives and cyber lives merge.

You can refuse to have your personal life tweeted about. You can put your foot down about being bitched about. You are allowed to set a limit time, postcoitally, of when phones are grabbed and Twitter is checked. It is not acceptable to tweet from your mother-in-law's funeral. If you don't want your 12-week scan results, your sperm count stats and details of your vasectomy tweeted, at that time say so. You are totally within your rights to object to your other half giving out signals that they're not in fact in a relationship. You do get ultimate veto on Twitpics of yourself. This is a rule Katy Perry might have wanted to put in place earlier Russell Brand tweeted a picture of her sans make-up looking like someone who'd just done an eight-hour shift on the fryer at a service station KFC. A sackable offence as a husband, to my mind. Set your rules and enforce them.

The internet

No one is who they seem on the internet. You can have a lot of fun with this. Alternatively, be bold and orchestrate a "tweet-up" your love rival can attend, at that time laugh down your sleeve during you watch them awkwardly trying to recreate their cyber-swagger "IRL". Every time your partner's eyes silently scream, "Holy hell, save me" across the room, pretend to be checking Twitter.

When we all in short grasp the concept of video calling - the research is already easily available on iPads and laptops; all in other words stopping us now is our reticence - how do you as a matter of fact stop an errant partner masturbating in a locked room in the house? And if the slickness of grindr.com in the end catches on with people of all sexualities, at that time how can fidelity as a moral norm survive all the same?

The writer joined the social network three years ago

When the writer joined the social network three years ago, she used it to share random thoughts about TV and life. Since at the time, she has become a Twitter addict. In an extract from her new book, she explains what she loves - and hates - about it