In our consumer-driven culture, we define relationships with materialist symbols: saccharine cards on Valentine’s Day, long-stemmed roses on anniversaries, and diamond rings at engagements all serve as measures of our devotion to monogamy. However, with social-networking sites such as Facebook commanding an average of 20 minutes of our attention each day, a new standard of exclusivity is quickly divesting chocolates and perfumes of their primary significance. Forget meeting the parents: The ubiquitous Facebook “relationship status” now defines the seriousness of romance with a drop-down menu. We can be straightforwardly “single” or “in a relationship,” or more ambiguously define our love life as “it’s complicated.” Once ascertained, either alone or in tandem with a significant other, Facebook faithfully announces this romantic classification to hundreds of “friends,” many of whom are brief acquaintances or, at worst, complete strangers.

With its unapologetic eschewal of nuance, Facebook pressures us to define our relationships and display the results for all to see. Yet relationships, like people, do not fit neatly into predefined categories. The premium that Facebook places on categorization has only exacerbated our societal obsession with affixing arbitrary labels to relationships and calculating our self-worth accordingly. For many women, “boyfriends” serve as status symbols, offering definitive proof of one’s capability to find a mate and achieve monogamous bliss; failure to assign that label can result in the abandonment of a healthy relationship for more “promising” prospects. This growing imperative to classify, and the anxiety over other peoples’ assumptions when that classification is inevitably removed, has changed the meaning of modern intimacy. Digesting complicated interpersonal interactions into broadcastable realities, virtual relationship statuses have come to define actual relationship statuses; indeed, the three words “in a relationship” have gained so much power that they can serve as the focal point of a breakup. In a testament to the definitive function of Facebook, the removal of that phrase often offers the final word, supplying undeniable proof that it is officially, and irreparably, over. Summing up the entirety of a relationship with a mockingly cliché broken-heart icon, Facebook forces this intensely private and vulnerable moment into the realm of public interrogation and imbues it with the disingenuous and impersonal tone of an e-mail.

Although usually uttered in jest, the statement “it’s not real until it’s on Facebook” increasingly offers an accurate description of reality. Solidified in the digital universe, a committed relationship status serves as an explicit pledge of fidelity and a safeguard against unwanted come-ons. The relief of seeing those words in plain text promises to end the agonizing guessing game by confirming, beyond doubt, that the other person feels the same way. For some people, this declaration can become decidedly too real: Take the extreme example of the London resident who hacked his estranged wife to death with a meat cleaver last October after she changed her Facebook relationship status to “single.” Psychotic tendencies aside, this tragic case demonstrates the reality-making power of labels and begs the questions: What makes the online construction of a relationship status any less ephemeral or more valid than the online construction of a new, and inauthentic, persona? Since when did a relationship have to be publicly confirmed and classified in order for it to mean something? And what motivates our desire to define our relationship for everyone else—isn’t it enough for us to define our relationship with the only other person whom it concerns?

Surely, proclaiming to the world that you care deeply about another person is not an action that warrants reproach. However, the transition from “single” to “in a relationship” on Facebook often stems from less-than-genuine sentiments, such as the desire to arouse jealousy in exes and single friends and the need for attention. Such motives, which would be decried as narcissistic in face-to-face conversation, somehow become socially acceptable when affirmed in the impersonal space of the Internet, where the safe barrier of the computer screen, and the absence of fact-checkers, separates the poster from the viewer and reality from fiction. The pervasive force of modern voyeurism—the fact that we can know intimate details about a person’s life and relationships without ever interacting with them, whether through Facebook, tabloids, or reality television—allows us to keep on looking, without examining the perverseness of transforming the act of viewing into a pleasure in and of itself. Against the atomized reality of individuals socializing through screens and in complete isolation, many still feel the need to classify their relationships based on our assumptions of how others will react—whether they be envious ex-boyfriends or childhood friends. The danger is that relationships, when placed on parade through the Internet, will become less about personal fulfillment and more about the perceptions and assumptions of others, a tendency that can cause an individual to lose both herself, and her relationship, in the process.

For better or for worse, Facebook is a dating service. Yet, by transforming the relationship into a public status symbol, it has enabled us to forgo intimacy and vulnerability and has promoted the further fetishization of the labels “boyfriend” and “girlfriend.” We would all be wise to think carefully before assigning such definitive, and eminently public, definitions to our love lives.



Courtney A. Fiske ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.