Next month, I will be married for 23 years and, Facebook, I've got news: as far as status goes, Married and It's Complicated are not two separate categories. Women who have been married for more than a few years, and especially those with children, know this fundamental truth.
Harvard professor and author Edward L. Gleaser believes that e-mail and Facebook can actually improve our relationships and connecting via cyberspace actually increases the value of face-to-face interactions.
A woman in Brooksville, Florida unfriended her live-in boyfriend whilst in a pique about something or other. And that very umbrage came back many-fold as the live-in boyfriend confronted his lady about the unfriending and her status change to single (and, implicitly, ready to mingle). Eventually, the fracas came to such a boil that John Law was called to the feuding couple's mutual residence.
Dear Lucia, I've dated my boyfriend for 1 year and a half. We are Christians and have not had sex. We are not virgins, we both had other relationships and lovers before we met but we made a commitment to purity until marriage He told me he was not happy with his job situation and was desperate for a change. I got anxious since we had talked and fantasized about the idea of marriage. He started feeling pressure, freaked out and bailed the day before Valentines Day, because he thought I was expecting a proposal.
Well, Facebook, now you've done it. The latest study released by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML) claims that Facebook actually causes divorce in one in five marriages. The reason? Hooking up with exes, flirting and the likes are all too easy on the social networking site. However, I would argue that many marriages that suffer an irreparable "Facebook incident" had issues long before the spouses starting sending out friend requests; Facebook is merely an easily accessible tool for a wandering heart.
This is a topic close to my heart, as I am married to a techie geek. I'm not insulting him - he would probably take it as a compliment, actually. And well he should. Were it not for my husband's tech prowess, I'd still be rolling paper into our old dot-matrix printer and trying to figure out the fax machine. He has succeeded in dragging his at-times technophobic wife into the 21st century, and truly, it needed to happen. This is a wave - a tsunami - that unless we get on top of, we will find ourselves drowned by.
There are so many things wrong with the "It's Complicated" status that sometimes I wonder if Facebook just threw it up on the profile settings just for kicks and giggles. Maybe this so-called relationship status comes with the territory of our generation's tendency to overshare on social media sites, but this is almost as bad as your sister posting a home video of giving birth to her firstborn on Facebook and tagging it, "a miracle."
Created by Dan Loewenherz, Breakup Notifier does exactly what its name suggests. Users will have the chance to compile lists of their "taken friends" so that they can receive an e-mail when these friends change their status from "In a Relationship" to "Single."
On February 13, 2011, YourTango celebrated the very first annual Break Up With Your Ex Day, a day on which we urged people to let go of painful memories, insidious social media connections and dead weight relationship baggage in an attempt to move on in both love and life. We asked you to unfollow, untag, delete, block and erase. How did YourTango readers do?
In what's being lauded as a victory for the LGBT community, Facebook has added civil unions and domestic partnerships as relationship statuses for users in the United States, Canada the United Kingdom, France and Australia. The feature, which went into effect last Thursday, allows you to choose either of those options (or "in a Civil Partnership," for those in the UK), in the drop-down menu of familiar statuses like "Married," "in a Relationship," and "it's Complicated."
In theory, online dating should be fairly simple, but those of us who have tried it know that setting up a profile, weeding through matches and sending flirtatious messages back and forth is almost as time-consuming as meeting people offline. Not to mention that most reputable services are expensive. If you're open to online dating, but aren't ready to sign up for an account just yet, you may want to consider apps and services that work directly from your Facebook and Twitter account to help you find love.
Among the mass of Super Bowl commercials that hit the airways on Sunday evening, to us, one stood out as particularly confounding. Chevrolet has now oh-so-graciously gifted us with the ability to Facebook stalk while driving. Um, thank you? Sure, it was a cute commercial to debut Chevy’s latest feature. We’ll even admit that it’s pretty cool technology has expanded to the point where we can check Facebook in our cars if we want to. But that’s just it, isn’t it? Do we really want to?
“My wife joined Facebook and was spending an incredible amount of time reconnecting with old friends…(t)hen, she found one of her high school sweethearts from 22 years ago. And yes, they were soon involved in an emotional affair…(S)he informed me that she wanted out of the marriage because she was involved with someone else. I soon discovered who he was and that it started with FB. She moved out and our divorce was final 3 weeks ago today. She walked away from her husband, her children, and her home for this guy. Only to find that after all of his sweet talking and promises, he was not going to leave his wife and kids as they had originally planned…So, here she is…no husband, children that don’t want to see her, no home…and no FB boyfriend (yet). She’s lost her good girl reputation not only with my family and friends, but with her own family and friends as well. 18 years together. 13 years married. It just feels as if it was all for nothing.”
February 13th is the day to Break Up With Your Ex. And given Jeff Foxworthy's immense popularity in past decades, we thought we'd break it down with 10 signs you really need to sever your digital and social media ties to your ex.
It's easy to act snobby about social media. Facebook? What a waste of time. Twitter? Narcissist central. Unless you're an avid diaryist, though, there's no denying that your Facebook profile contains the densest amount of information about your daily life. Information doesn't have to mean pointless niceties, like what you ate for breakfast. If you're in a relationship, it can mean the first flirty wall post your significant other ever sent you. It can mean a slew of congratulations you received after making your engagement Facebook official. Depending on how personal you get, your blog posts and tweets about someone may contain an immediacy lost in a relationship with twenty years under its belt. Granted, you probably won't want to scroll through two decades of Facebook statuses in the year 2030. If only there were a service that would bundle your social media profiles as sentimental, prettily-packaged keepsakes, right?
Facebook is really great for reconnecting with old friends and finding out what your buddies are up to. What it is also great for: shattering every illusion you ever had about your first love—just like it did for me this weekend.