Love in the time of Facebook

Facebook has been in the news a lot lately with it's new valuation, and throughout last year with the enjoyable 'The Social Network' movie and allusions to the fact that with over 500 million members, if it were a country, it would have the third largest population on the planet. Now rather than talk about the phenomenon that is Facebook, something that has been covered elsewhere by far more able writers than myself, this post is about the impact the social networking site has had, and will have, on relationships. This is also something that has no doubt been covered by a number of writers, but recently two things happened that sparked my interest in the topic.

Firstly, I was told of a relationship that had it's roots on the site itself. In a nutshell, two mutual friends of the owner of the profile in question commented on the same status update of this user. These two people had never met before in person, yet whatever was said in those comments, and unfortunately I'm not privy to the specifics of that information, lead the two to exchange emails, meet in person and eventually start dating.

Now maybe I'm out of touch and you're thinking to yourself, big deal, but at the time this seemed staggering to me and to a certain extent still does. I mean, I'm not shocked at people meeting prospective partners online, be it through chat room, dating site or whatever, but this was the first Facebook romance I had heard of. However, the more I thought about it the less staggering it began to seem and in a lot of ways made perfect sense. There are undeniably routes through which people meet their partners and 'mutual friend' is definitely one of the most common of these. Certainly speaking from personal experience I've found this to be the case both with myself and friends. So why do you have to meet this person at the mutual friend's party or on a night out? Seemingly you don't. And surely that can only be a good thing, I'm all for anything that brings people together.

However, great and all as it is having another avenue through which to meet a potential partner, Facebook undoubtedly has created more pitfalls both for those in relationships and, worse still, those ending them. It's the latter that brings me on to my second point.

I heard one of the most sweet but also most heart-wrenching things in this regard recently. The couple in question decided to spend some time apart, and while both acknowledged that this was something that needed to happen, neither wanted the relationship to end. Both had profile pictures with the other person in them, and seeing as they were going to be at the very least taking a break, it would be necessary to change their profiles. Yet neither wanted to be the first to do this, as to do so was a confirmation of what was happening and also potentially sending the wrong message to the other party that this was an easy thing for them to do, and so for a number of days both kept the images up.

I don't think anyone can fully appreciate the impact Facebook has had heretofore and will have on relationships henceforth. The above is only one aspect of this, there's also obvious aspects, such as changing the 'relationship status' if this has been set (something I understand can't be done entirely discreetly, it gets published on your page regardless, even if you do delete it immediately after) and deleting photos you've uploaded of each other. Yet, there are slightly less obvious aspects such as removing tags of yourself in friends' photos of the two of you together to consider and the culling of friends that were 'more their friends' than yours.

These things of course existed before Facebook, albeit in slightly different guises, but it has made it more difficult and above all more public. And it's this public element which is the real negative in all of this to my mind. Facebook can create a situation whereby a friend, be they bosom buddy or casual acquantice, can know or at the very least have an inclining that a spilt has occured even before you've had a chance to, in your own time, discuss it with them.

One of Facebook's missions was to put the aspects of (initially college) social life and interaction online. It has achieved this to a staggering extent and what's more impressive (or depressive) is that it's created whole new ones. And make no mistake, they're here to stay. Will it be in the form of Facebook? Possibly not, maybe it will be replaced by something else and become, as some like to say, next years MySpace! But one thing is for sure, people have got a taste for online social networks and I can't see that abating anytime soon, changing sure, but they'll be here for a long time to come.

Social networks are here to stay and so are the problems, and to be fair opportunities, that they present. How long before the self-help book 'Relationships and Facebook: When Someone You Love Doesn't Want to Poke You Anymore' is on the shelves, if indeed it's not already.

So unless you're one of the ever shrinking few in the online world that has avoided the grasp of Facebook, this is probably something you'll come face-to-face with in the future (pun intended btw).

Relationships can be challenging at the best of times, but thanks to Facebook, things are about to get a whole lot worse.