you did WHAT? with whom?!

Yesterday, while studying with a friend of mine (studying being a loosely used term, we were actually talking about everything except for our statistics quiz we were supposed to be preparing for), he commented to me, “So my girlfriend wanted to go Facebook official with me today, but I hit ‘deny.’”

Aside from my initial shock that she was still his girlfriend after being rejected, I recognized a broader social scope of Facebook than I had realized before.

A topic often addressed these days when job searching, friend searching, and even date searching is the usefulness and effectiveness of Facebook. Someone’s profile can either make or break any of these connections, and what people post on their profiles explicitly allows not only their close friends but also their 300 other “friends” to view and therefore pass judgment on.

However, besides racy photos and rude wallposts, an often overlooked feature that also can affect one’s connections is the ubiquitous relationship status.

Along with obvious choices such as “Single,” “In a Relationship with,” “Engaged,” and “Married,” there are also the more dubious statuses of “In an Open Relationship with,” and “It’s Complicated with.”

How one fills this out is seen, at least by my peers, as a reflection of their personality. Some people, mostly girls, often put themselves in a relationship with their closest friends and see the feature as a joke, although at one point my mother wasn’t too happy with possible employers seeing me in a relationship with another girl despite my heterosexuality.

Others take it more seriously. “Facebook official” is a campus-wide term for finally announcing to everyone you know – and even a lot of people you don’t know but you added at some point because they were cute – that you are, in fact, off the market.

Conversely, when a Facebook breakup happens, it’s not just gossip between your closest friends or housemates, that person you talked to twice in the hallways way back in high school wants to give you a shoulder to cry on – or maybe even contribute further toward you getting over your ex. I’ve heard a lot of my girlfriends lament, “My ex never got on Facebook, but the second we broke up, he changed his relationship status to single so fast my friends knew before I even told them!”

What has the world come to? Is it really that important to broadcast your entire life, good and bad, to not only the whole campus but also everyone you have come into contact since you started a profile? The relationship status feature is truly one that irks me due to the amount of attention it gets for being what is: a gossip generator.

So the next time you enter into a relationship with someone so amazing that you can’t wait to post it to Facebook, aka tell the entire world, think of this: Do you also want the entire world to know when (and wonder why) your significant other stopped thinking you’re so amazing?