Like the unwelcomed ass grab in a bar, Facebook is becoming the uninvited guest in a relationship. Facebook flutters between being considered part of a group and being an outcast that most want to knee in the balls. Like an unwelcomed advance by your karate instructor, many find Facebook’s meddling into one’s personal affairs a bit skeevy, sleazy and weird.
Real life bachelor and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, admits they divulge to marketers “insights into people’s activity” because relational status is a huge market. Because of an increase in divorce rates, longer life expectancies, and a delayed onset of first marriages, the singles market has exploded. Thus, the ability for social networks to collect users’ marital status information is proving valuable to many companies.
But for a couple trying to maintain a healthy dating relationship, Facebook can be the kiss of death. After all, it can be upsetting to learn online that your boyfriend has another girlfriend, that your lady spends all day playing Treasure Island or that your man's Ex wants him to see her Fortune Cookie!
And a Facebook Breakup? Well, that’s right up there with the Text Message Breakup and the Email Breakup. It’s when one uses the private messaging system to notify the other that they are a spineless douche bag and they are ending the relationship. At least have the class to have the conversation in person, for gawd sake, rather than ducking behind the new trench coat of America – social media – to have the conversation for you.
“Why did you drop me from Facebook?” He asked.
“Well, ‘to drop’ is an unintentional action,” she responded.
“Thus, you were very much deleted because you were also dating someone else” she added with confidence.
Conversations like these are happening more and more across the country. Relationships are now being measured by whether or not people are paired on Facebook. News flash: A relationship can still exist without a Facebook account! In fact, dating relationship would probably benefit by not opening themselves up to the clumsy blunders of a third party called Facebook. “Even before social networks were born,” says John Michael Norvell, an anthropologist on Harvard's campus, "people had ways of telegraphing their status." While Facebook invented neither unions, nor breakups, nor the gossip that surrounds them, Norvell claims the site makes chatter faster and more public -- two aspects that may have an impact on interpersonal relations.
If swapped varsity jackets and pins signified that two individuals were now a couple back in the day, listing your significant other on Facebook makes it official these days. "A relationship or a breakup isn't official until you see it on Facebook" adds Norvell. And since there is some truth to that statement, it would behoove couples to keep intimate information such as their dating status private unless they also won’t mind it were news to go public that they’ve just been dropped, deleted and are now single again.
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