Reshaping Love

When you just break up with someone, or when you just start dating someone, or when you're going through a rough patch the first thing that comes into mind is.... your Facebook relationship status! For some reason we all feel it necessary to be completely honest with Facebook. And since it plays such an important role in our daily lives it is the first thing we think of, especially with changes in our relationships. Never before would we want to immediately announce the start of a relationship or break up to all our friends. In fact the crazy part is that it is not just our "close friends" on Facebook like discussed in my last post, we've decided that the moment we figure out our relationship status we need to tell the world (of Facebook). Although there are a few people out there who have gone through these stages of changing relationship status and choosen to hide it, I would say the majority don't. Since we choose to publically display it people have now created the new behaviour of commenting on it. Personally, commenting when someone becomes single is an awkward thing to do, what exactly is the right thing to say? I know I often just feel bad for the person.

Not only are people updating hundreds of people on their relationship status because of our (intense) engagement on Facebook, they are also willing to abide by the categories Facebook presents for our relationships. We (as users of Facebook) are choosing to be considered single, in a relationship, it's complicated, engaged, or married. In response to this categorization, I came across a great blog about Facebook relationships that says "if statuses were to truly represent the real world, then the only honest status would be "it's complicated"(Jed Brubaker). I completely agree relationships are a rollercoaster! It is interesting to see how we've let Facebook redefine our relationship and how we have given Facebook so much power. I am a prime example of giving Facebook power as when my friend recently broke up with her boyfriend, the first things I reminded her of was to make sure she hid her relationship status on Facebook or else her "has now become single" would show up on everyone's news feed. We can see how much Facebook has even reshaped our thought process. Perhaps, one could almost say it is a new expectation of a good friend to remind her of things like this.



It's not just social networking sites that have had an affect on relationships, instant messaging has greatly too. Through texting and MSN we have created expectations that our partner will keep us updated all the time. This creates more opportunity for fights when a partner "disappears" because they have not informed the other about what they are doing. Since so many of us always have a cell phone, and some even have internet them, we are expected to be in constant communication. Showing affection has also been redefined. All of a sudden the number of posts on each other’s walls, screen names and emails dictate the amount of love felt for one another. And jealousy sparks when someone from the opposite sex writes on their wall, or talks to them too much whether through MSN or texting (I know I have been guilty of this before). For me it is very evident that we have created new expectations and reshaped our relationships because of the immediacy of our communication tools today.

I want to make sure my point is clear that I am not in any way suggesting Facebook has caused these changes, but that our choice to rank Facebook of high importance in our lives, and our choice to extensively engage in it, has created and reshaped our relationships. Don't you agree?

We need to start to remember "as the web becomes increasingly socialized, saturated with our personal information, now might be a good time to stop and remember that we define our relationships, not any website's limited information architecture" (Jed Brubaker)