When I was eighteen and flush with excitement over my newfound adult independence, I spontaneously married my best friend. This year marks our ten-year anniversary, and also our first significant relationship hurdle: I’m about to marry someone else.
I suppose I should reveal that my best friend is a woman, named Maureen, and she and I are not actually legally married, or even romantically involved. But for the past decade, we have listed one another as spouses on Facebook.
We did it as a joke, really. I barely remember the details. Facebook had been on our college campus for all of 27 minutes, and we were giddy over our new toy. Realizing early on that Facebook was just that—a fun time-suck through which we could portray ourselves however we so desired—and not wanting to admit publicly the painfully arid deserts that were our love lives at the time, one of us, I don’t remember who, selected “Married,” and invited the other to be her Facebook spouse. The proposal was accepted, and we never looked back.
I think we assumed one of us would eventually break it off as a man came into the picture, but we never did. It morphed from a joke into something of a social, or social media, crutch. Through the years, as we drifted in and out of relationships and, worse, long and sometimes lonely periods of singledom, we never had to worry about how our romantic lives were reflected on Facebook. During what another pal calls “that weird gray area,” when you’re not sure if a relationship is serious enough to warrant a status change and you’re not quite ready to have that talk, we were mostly able to avoid those awkward conversations. We never found ourselves having to change our statuses from “In a relationship” to “Single,” an update that is usually met with a flurry of comments to the tune of “Wait, what?!” or “OMG, so sorry 
:(” from long-lost acquaintances or distant relatives who probably don’t need to know your relationship status in the first place.
Facebook users wishing to avoid such commentary would be wise to adapt our faux-relationship method, particularly now, in light of the brand new “Ask” feature, a button which allows your friends to inquire, uninvited, about any personal information you may have left blank. It’s one thing when your friends ask to know your hometown or current city, quite another when they request details about your love life. Of course, this is not the first time Facebook has made headlines with updates to this profile feature. A few years ago, the site provided more relationship status options, adding “domestic partnership” and “civil union” to their original, more traditional lineup, which included “Single,” “Married,” and, of course, “It’s complicated.” Earlier this year, Facebook increased its gender listing options from two—male and female—to about 50, acknowledging that modern identities are vast and complex. While these additions seem progressive, refreshing, and necessary, they also put further pressure on users to define and share every single aspect of our lives.
I tend to assume that most people choose to share what they share and hide what they hide for a reason. If the immense and growing amount of Internet PDA—of which I am guilty, I will admit—proves anything, it is that when people have something they feel is worth sharing, oh, they’ll share. A relationship status left blank is likely to be blank on purpose. Nearly all of my single friends, male and female, have opted not to list a status rather than identify themselves as single. Now, the gleaming white “Ask” box draws unwanted attention to parts of our lives we might prefer to ignore. Aren’t prodding aunties, grandbaby-hungry moms, and magazine articles about ticking clocks reminder enough?
Others, like my pal Claire, choose to keep their relationship status undefined even though they are romantically involved. Claire has been seeing her boyfriend for about nine months—and engaging in a lot of Facebook PDA—but both of them have left their relationship status boxes blank. “It’s not really intentional,” she told me. “I guess it just never occurred to us for the first few months. Once it did, we decided we don’t really care. I don’t think not being Facebook Official makes it any less defined. I think that’s all silly. I mean, we’re annoyingly obvious about our relationship on Facebook as it is.”
Then there are those for whom changing their relationship status is a major milestone. One friend once sweetly told me how he viewed making his relationship “Facebook Official” as a way to publicly display his love for his girlfriend, who’d had nothing but unsupportive partners in her past. Another friend, in a same-sex partnership, used a status update to publicly come out, and was moved and overwhelmed by the positive outpouring of support.
Even as I met and dated my now-fiancé, Brian, I never once considered updating my status. He didn’t care. We were too busy living our relationship in the real world to worry about defining it in the digital one. This isn’t to say I hid him or was ashamed to call him mine. Like Claire’s, my Facebook wall is rife with couple shots and wedding-planning updates; any reader could easily deduce that I’m in a relationship, “official” or not. When it comes to criticizing excessive Facebook relationship activity, I’m pretty much the pot Instagramming the kettle #soblack.
Last October, when Brian and I got engaged, everyone suddenly seemed to find it vitally important that I change my status. A shocking number of friends and family members asked explicitly if our engagement meant that I’d be ending my Facebook involvement with Maureen, or even suggested that we had to change our statuses after Brian’s and my wedding this August. Maureen herself even gave me her blessing to cut things off. I couldn’t help but find this fixation on my relationship status conspicuous. Why not demand veracity of my job designation, currently listed as “Head Penguin, Penguin Group, USA,” a title that is pretty clearly made up? Similarly, my profile photos are of Prince George, Amy Poehler, or gigantic sandwiches. I’m not a royal baby, a comedienne, or a hoagie, but no one seems too concerned about this.
I have been “married” to Maureen for six years longer than I’ve been dating Brian, and I don’t see why this deep, enduring friendship, a relationship I treasure and take pride in, should matter any less than my engagement. Maybe one day I’ll be moved to join the ranks of the “Facebook Official,” but for the time being, I think we’ll stick it out, Maureen and me. We’ve been through so much over the past ten years. I think our Facebook marriage is strong enough to survive my real one.
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