#NerdsUnite: Facebook + Your Relationship (To update your relationship status? or not? That is the question!)

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Jen. She's a graphic designer by day and a serial monogamist by night that lives across the pond in the UK. She's currently in a relationship of 8 years, and her dating record prior had been puddle jumps from 3 months here ... to 3 months there. These are her thoughts on life, love, and all things nerd. Hit it Jen!! </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Jen Randall

Facebook + Your Relationship

Ok, so there isn’t really any etiquette for when to add someone to Facebook....do you do it pre-date, post 1st date, post 2nd date, once you’ve established you’re dating exclusively??  Facebook really is complicated!  Answers on a postcard.

So this (super hot and awesome) girl I know recently started to question her boyfriend’s feelings for her on the basis that he never ‘likes’ her Facebook statuses, doesn’t comment on her wall and always untags photos.  When I suggested that maybe she was being a little bit ridiculous she honestly could not see where I was coming from.  She was so wrapped up in what other people were seeing on his / her Facebook profiles that she seemed to forget that she actually lives with this guy and so Facebook should really be irrelevant – in other words who cares whether he ‘likes’ your status because I’m pretty sure he’s going to ‘like’ you when he gets home.

“Ohmygod he just liked that b*tches facebook status...that MUST mean he’s cheating on me and I need to contact Dick Van Dyke (in his Diagnosis Murder days) and find a Facebook hacker and ohmygod my life is over and I HATE HIM.”

Weirdly, changing your Facebook status should be a mutual decision, but ask yourself this, do you feel like “can we change our Facebook statuses” is a conversation you feel like your grown-up life warrants?  Really?  By no means am I saying I’ve never done this, though obviously my status has been the same for 8 years, but it just seems like a real high school thing to be doing.  Facebook defines relationships well (and by “well” I mean “hideously badly”).  When you have an argument with your significant other and s/he immediately changes his/her status to “it’s complicated”, it’s probably time you change yours to “single”.  

Facebook + The Break-up

Facebook has turned into an all-singing all-dancing electronic record of your dating history, which might be great for some people, but for others, I am implicating myself here, it’s a disaster.  From the guy who committed an armed robbery shortly after we broke up (and was featured in the news news), to the guy who has questionable photos of me from when I was 17, then there’s the guy who was incarcerated in a mental health facility shortly after we broke up, I’m not saying I was the cause....but they do say “if the cap fits wear it”, don’t forget the guy who’s virginity I took but didn’t realise, and the guy who I abandoned mid-coitus...who happens to be the same guy I only ‘dated’ because his bestfriend broke up with me to go back to his ex-girlfriend...and really my dating history only gets worse but also more entertaining.  But I am still linked to all of those people through Facebook (not all of them directly, but indirectly through friends, they are still visable), this makes moving on kind of hard or it would do if I didn’t have the emotions of a dry fish when it came to past relationships.

Breaking up with someone is difficult enough, being broken up with is obviously worse, but when you’re doing it in front of 600+ of your nearest and dearest (hahah) friends (and 600+ of your girlfriend/boyfriends friends) the hurt is multiplied to ridiculous levels.  The point at which you break up is hard, but the removal of that Facebook status is harder because then come all the questions and people you haven’t heard from in 10 years sending you messages asking what happened and “did he cheat on you” and “who did you sleep with” and “we knew you’d mess it up”.  Then worst of all is the moving on.  Who cares that you got in there first and are already flaunting your shit around all the clubs and on all the dating sites you can think that your ex might see, whilst simultaneously tagging hundreds of photos of you with other random guys.....your ex just posted a photo....s/he is holding hands with someone....and it’s not you.

:::heart breaks:::

The worst example of this I’ve seen recently is a guy my boyfriend knows.  He’s approximately 23 or 24, he got married 2 years ago and had a baby about 12-18 months ago.  Everyone knew that he was cheating on his wife (it feels so weird to call someone a wife at that age!), but no-one said anything.  Then oneday he told his friends that he had left his wife and child, no more than 2 weeks later he had changed his status from “married” to “in a relationship” and changed his profile picture from one of him and his child to a MySpace style photo of him and his new girlfriend (a classy iPhone, from above, in bed, head-only shot edited with Photoshop for iPhone so the edges were blurred and it looked all dreamy and yes I just said it looked “dreamy”).  Obviously when this happened the first thing I did was check to see if he had de-friended his wife.  He hadn’t.

The moral of this fragmented story is....change to Google+, you’re boyfriend/girlfriend most likely hasn’t had an invite yet.

#thatisall

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