TikTok and the Shifting Standards of Marital Happiness from a Hadith Perspective

Abstract

TikTok has become more than an entertainment platform; its algorithmic feed increasingly participates in defining what users perceive as a desirable life, including an ideal marriage. Short videos featuring gifts, travel, housing, income, domestic role-sharing, and romantic gestures can be repeatedly encountered in visually attractive and readily comparable forms. This study examines how such exposure may shift standards of marital happiness and asks how prophetic traditions can offer an ethical framework for evaluating marriage in an algorithmic media environment. Using a qualitative library-based design and thematic hadith analysis, the study integrates hadiths on the direction of comparison, qana’ah, gratitude, holistic evaluation of one’s spouse, and goodness toward family with contemporary scholarship on TikTok personalization, social comparison, and relationship satisfaction. The findings show that the principal problem is not aspirational content itself but the conversion of curated representations into external marital benchmarks. Hadith redirects evaluation from visible performance to lived relational quality and from escalating comparison to proportional appreciation of existing blessings. As its conceptual contribution, the study formulates digital qana’ah as an ethical discipline consisting of representational awareness, comparative filtering, reflective gratitude, holistic spousal evaluation, and non-mimetic improvement. This concept extends qana’ah from an individual ethic of sufficiency into a relational and epistemic competence for negotiating algorithmically intensified comparison. The study argues that algorithms may organize what appears on a feed, but prophetic values should retain authority over what counts as a good and happy marriage.