Single women should ditch Facebook because the ‘perfect lives’ of their friends are bad for their health, a relationship expert has warned.

Author Zoe Strimpel says the social media site bombards singletons with pictures of ‘perfect’ weddings and babies which causes envy and voyeurism.

She said: ‘What [Facebook] does is it enhances the sense that your life is lacking and specifically, when you are single, you focus in on all those pictures of perfect weddings, perfect babies, perfect couples.

She urged single women to cut down or get rid of Facebook completely during a lecture at Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas.

She said getting rid of your profile will help ‘limit that delicious but yucky feeling of voyeurism, slight envy, maybe even narcissism.’

Ms Strimpel, who wrote ‘Man Diet: One Woman’s Quest to End Bad Romance’, said the fairer sex also spends too much time monitoring potential suitors online.

She said the ready availability of biographical information on Facebook encourages women to over-analyse potential dates.

‘You become addicted to information that you might not need to know about, say, Joe the musician who you drunkenly snogged at a house warming, but who turns out has a girlfriend.

‘Thanks to Facebook you may know his mother’s name, the details of his last holiday, the names of his exes, who he is hanging around with.

‘This is not healthy or helpful information, plus it gives the impression that these men are more in your life than they actually are, which is quite corrosive.

‘There’s plenty of psychology that supports taking a break from social media.’

On a more positive note. The Joy of Sex rewriter Susan Quilliam told the same conference modern women have never had it better in bed.

The psychologist, single at 63 after her marriage of 25 years ended, said women are free to enjoy sex – unlike her mother who didn’t know what her clitoris was.

Ms Strimpel said the site ‘enhances the sense that your life is lacking and specifically, when you are single, you focus in on all those pictures of perfect weddings, perfect babies, perfect couples’ (file picture)

She said: ‘I can, if I so wish, go out and sleep with somebody tonight without opprobrium, without being told I’m a slut.

‘Well there are some people who will still think I’m a slut, but largely we are lucky.

‘We are lucky post pill and post the Abortion Act to be able to know and decide where, what, who, how and also whether and where to look for sex – and where things are and what to do with them.

‘My mother admitted to me she did not know what her clitoris was.’

Ms Strimpel and Ms Quilliam were joined by The Erotic Review founder Rowan Pelling to discuss ‘How to be a single woman in 2013, whether you’re 25 or 60’.

Explaining the inspiration for her book, Ms Strimpel added: ‘I was 28 and I just had broken up with a boyfriend – “‘Oh my God I’m single, I’d better act single”.

She added that the wealth of information available on Facebook encourages women to over-analyse potential dates. ‘This is not healthy or helpful information, plus it gives the impression that these men are more in your life than they actually are, which is quite corrosive’

‘I’ve got to in some way channel Samantha from Sex and the City. What this meant was seeing a lot of men, most of whom I didn’t particularly like, and going on dates even when I would have preferred to stay in with a cup of tea and a book.

‘It meant a lot of drinking, a lot of staying out late and feeling hungover at work, which was horrible.

‘It meant telling a lot of funny stories about my capers to my friends, who loved it and they wanted more and more, and spending a lot time worrying about various guys that I don’t even remember now.

‘There was fun goodness and yucky badness. For some reason the badness was getting the upper hand.’
Read more: Daily Mail