Lee Rosen, an attorney with Rosen Law Firm in Raleigh, and Alice Stubbs, an attorney with Tharrington Smith LLP in Raleigh, have agreed that a majority of the divorce cases they handle are related to problems with a spouse's behavior on social networking sites.

"It's been really an interesting phenomenon," said Stubbs. "In the last five years, Facebook, MySpace - all the social networking sites have changed the face of domestic law, and we obtain a lot of evidence from social networking." 

One particular problem the attorney's point out is cheating. Users not only flock to sites like Facebook to stay connected with people close to them, but also have the ability to search for old classmates, best friends from long ago, and of course, lost loves. 

A specific instance shared on WRAL.com was the story of a man named "Scott," who chose to remain anonymous in the article. His wife, whom he was married to for 13 years, had cheated on him with a man she met on MySpace. 

"This was a former fiancé, an old flame," said Scott. "They hooked up online, found each other, started communicating, and that relationship started to grow a little bit."

According to Rosen and Stubbs, this type of story is one they hear often in divorce cases. Stubbs has even seen situations where people have left their job, children or the state they live in to be with someone they met on the internet. In most divorce cases, social networking sites are involved in one way or another, such as one or both spouses using the networking tools to find incriminating evidence on the other. 

"All sorts of things go on Facebook," said Rosen. "There's real cheating. There are things that sound like cheating and then there are all sorts of other things like threats, comments that shouldn't have been made. It is a communication device that now has every kind of communication, positive and negative." 

So how do you stop Facebook from destroying your marriage? Rosen, Stubbs and Scott have a few points of advice. They suggest sharing your username and password with your spouse so that “everybody knows exactly what's going on."

While sharing a username and password is fine, Rosen notes that breaking into a spouse's social networking account is illegal. Scott agrees that sharing such information with one another is the way to keep a long-lasting marriage.  

"I'm not advocating that anyone become a snoop, but if that's what you feel you have to do in a marriage relationship, there should be no expectation that everything you do is private, because you have a sacred obligation to your spouse," said Scott. 

Stubbs' advice is to just delete the entire account while going through a divorce to avoid the temptation of posting something that your spouse may be able to use against you.