Dating in the Facebook Age
Guest post by By B. Imei Hsu, RN,LMHC – Part one of a two part series on relationships and Facebook
“Are you Bernice?” queried the barista.
“Yes. Do I know you?” I answered.
“Yes. I follow you on Facebook.”
I admit that I am still surprised whenever I hear someone other than family use my given name. But on Facebook, my full name is listed as my address so it remains searchable to childhood friends, extended family, and colleagues who knew me before I felt I was ready to be known as my Chinese name, Imei. The barista and I had a laugh after we traced how it is we knew each other. This is one of the true pleasures of relationship aided by Social Media, and in particular, enhanced by Facebook: meeting someone you formerly knew as a tiny image and sound bytes on your computer, and seeing him in the flesh.
“Itʼs nice to finally meet you,” I smiled. Then I realized I didnʼt have a stick of makeup on, I was wearing jeans and a hoodie, and I looked like something the cat dragged in. Oy.
As a Relationship Counselor, Life Advisor, and Blogger, I am asked to weigh-in on my opinion regarding the uses Social Media platforms and their connection with relationships. Because Social Media taps the voyeur within its participants, I find the topic both psychologically relevant and entertaining.
The other day, I ran into a friend who lamented about the way younger (for the purposes of this article, letʼs throw down the arbitrary and unscientific age of 39 and below as the differentiating age of the word younger) participants of Facebook use the popular Social Media platform as a means of interpreting the seriousness of love relationships. Having overheard two women talking about their current dating status, one woman asked the other, “Did he friend you?” The other responded, “Oh yeah, but he didn't update his relationship status from ‘single' to ‘in a relationship with.'” The first woman replied, “Well then, it isn't serious.”
Dating in the Age of Facebook
Should you let Facebook determine your relationship status? While I find it incredible why a social platform has the power we give it to connote meaning to a relationship's intensity, seriousness, or level of commitment, I confess that whether I think Facebook should or should not be that determiner is no longer the point. What, then, is the point? The point: right now, people DO use Facebook to highly influence the perception of their relationship status. How do they do this?
Ways People Let Facebook Determine Relationship Veracity
1. They friend the person they are dating early in the “get to know” phase. Nothing particularly wrong with that, unless you do not know you are dating someone with deep emotional problems, issues with boundaries, or stunted social skills.
2. If one person says no to the friending process, the other person may interpret that action to mean s/he is not important to the other person. Or it could mean someone is hiding something.
3. If they agree to friending, the clock is set on the day the friending occurs.
4. For whatever the “magic day” is in the mind of the one with the biggest awareness of the social pull of his/her group (usually the female, but in the case of same-sex or poly relationships, it can be either or both), that person will remind the other that it is “time” to adjust the Facebook status to reflect his/her perception of the level of time and activity.
Where they used to call it DTR (determine the relationship) back in the day, now it's FRS (Facebook Relationship Status). Why might this feel important to so many FB users? Just like the commitment ring, an announcement of engagement, or a proclamation of marriage, one or both of the individuals broadcast to their community the nature of their relationship when one or both parties feel it is in their best interest to either announce a sense of boundary and ownership (i.e.”she's mine”, “he's with me”), trumpet a sense of normality (i.e. “I'm in a real relationship and I'm normal”), or possibly offer a sense of explanation (i.e. “I'm spending time with this person X.”).
There is another option. You could have a mature conversation about how you use Facebook, what your expectations are, and what limits may exist for you. You could remind each other that what you tell each other in person is more important than what is revealed on your Facebook Wall (unless someone is particularly adept at lying). Does this sound like old-fashioned, face-to-face relationship skills, communication, garnering trust, and following your words with congruent action?
You bet.
How has Facebook changed your relationships? How has Facebook changed the way you date or view relationships? Share your thoughts on in the comment section below. We look forward to hearing from you.
B. Imei Hsu, is a nurse psychotherapist, cat lover, artist, and blogger. When sheʼs not running her private practice Seattle Direct Counseling , sheʼs goobing on her cats Lumi and Charles-Monet,spinning tunes as an iPad DJ, and writing her book, “Designing Your Practice: An Artistʼs Approach”. She lives in Seattle, WA.
This is so funny!
My husband (thank goodness I don’t have to worry about dating on social media or anywhere else!) and I have a friend whose wife was not on FB, and did not realize that her husbands FB status said “single”. When a mutual friend pointed it out, and she found out he’d been dating other women he’d met through social media, his “single” status stayed that way, but was finally true.
Very sad.
Social Media has allowed those with something to say to say it, but it has also allowed those people who are inclined to lie the perfect platform to do so.
So many different rules of society will have to be created because of technology!
Hi Jackie,
As a relationship counselor, I have seen this very kind of scenario just a few too many times. Whether it’s Facebook or anything else, everyone has the means available to choose to hide, lie, betray, or tell the truth. Social Media acts as a magnifier on the process, but the process obviously preceded the presence of these platforms.
It will be interesting to see the “rules” evolve. How do we find consensus? Or do we find consensus at all? I think the news will be filled with new and sometimes bizarre ways people have manipulated the tools for their use.
Thank you so much for commenting!
– Imei
As someone who falls near that unscientific cutoff age of 39, I do see how Facebook has changed, not necessarily the way we date, but definitely changed how people know someone is dating. Half of me wants to change my status from “widowed” to “in a relationship” and the other half of me says it is nobody’s business but our own.
Conformity and normalcy fit right in with that desire to be just like everyone else we interact with on facebook. And with facebook it’s not like it is just some alteration you make to your personal history, when you change your relationship status, it is posted whether you like it our not into the news feed for all to see. The interface does not give you a choice who to make it public to (as far as I know). Several of my younger friends will update their status and sometimes a mere two weeks later it’s changed back to single. Well, one can think folks are passing some of my gal pals around town with the frequency of relationship status updates.
It’s as if the programming interface of facebook rewards you with announcing your changed relationship status, because even in the faceless techno world we still want to announce to all of our subscribers that we are normal and not the lonely old cat ladies anymore! Well at least that’s my two cents. It’s like facebook as turned all relationships and communication into short messages sent out to anyone who is bothered to read them, and because we do not know each and every person on our mates friend list, either we hesitate on what is posted, or we go to the other extreme and post like madwomen about our lives. Or something like that.
Magpie- I hear you! [BTW, I am the cat lady, as I have two. I imagine I will die alone, happy, with five cats winding themselves around me].
As a statement, I once changed my Facebook relationship status every day for a week. I randomly chose friends to be in a civil union. If I could, I would form a poly, domestic partnership with my cats. Why? It sends a message: I do not use my FB the way it was intended.
If we could, more of us would likely hack our FB Walls to include more of the social subtleties of relationship that we experience in everyday life. But for now, I enjoy leaving my relationship status empty, a hanging question mark that I hope will call those I connect with to ask me, “How’s it going?” and start some real conversations.
Thanks for commenting.
– Imei
My embarrassing confession – I made my partner get on Facebook so that I could put that I was in a relationship with him. It was an interesting evolution of how this occurred.
At first, I had my relationship status as “in a relationship” not linked to anyone since Glenn was not on FB. Then I started getting teased by my friends. Some had not met him so they told me that they didn’t believe he existed! I was making him up. This was all in good fun of course! However, the ribbing and joking just increased among my friends. Finally, I made Glenn get a Facebook account so I could show to the world that he did in fact exist and that I was taken.
Reminds me of that South Park episode on Facebook!
Michelle –
Thanks for sharing this. Does it make you feel better that your confession is not unique?
It begs the question of whether it will become more commonplace in the future for people to actually create a person — similar to the movie, “Catfish” — where we can curate their memories, experiences, interests, etc? Will we have the equivalent virtual android of “Bladerunner,” replete with pictures and songs that the person likes, based on what is pleasing to us?
Hmm… I see a great sci-fi movie script coming out of this idea.
Your comment is a reminder that it is somehow becoming more difficult for people to perpetuate their sense of virtual presence without a Facebook page. I have been known to support a psychological theory for the popularity of Social Media: we use it in order to perpetuate the idea that we are ever-present, available when we’re actually not, and to curate ideas about ourselves that we’d like people to believe are true of us more often than not. I’m not surprised that your friends teased you about the real-ness of Glen’s existence without an FB page to declare his 24/7 presence.
So… here we are! Now what? This is about to get really interesting. Having let everyone know, we know have a sense of pressure to keep everyone “in the know” about the rest of the story, especially if we end up deviating from the beaten path.
– Imei
It does make me feel better. Also, Glenn has started really enjoying Facebook so that helps too!
The availability idea is an interesting issue. I agree. Facebook makes us seem available and more geographically close than most of the time we are. I schedule tweets to promote my blog when I know I will be in meetings. It makes me seem actively engaged in social media even when I am not around.
Facebook does keep our history. For better or for worse…which is a whole other post!
Makes you wonder… if FB keeps your history, but YOU are the curator of that history, who is to say why you can’t change history by re-writing it? I suppose that is a little of what Timeline is allowing us to do — to hide or remove things from our timeline.
You might be interested in checking out Jaron Lanier’s book, “You are not a gadget.” It’s the source material I was first inspired by in regards to the virtual world offering us an opportunity to appear available even when we’re not.
I had the sad and somewhat perplexing experience of losing a friend (a suicide) and then constructing a memorial Wall for her FB page. One eerie part is seeing updates from the days prior, her voice continuing into the present and then a future that never happened. I can imagine that FB may be used as a place to collect such presences and memories, and keep them in place for the person(s) who still grieve their absences and find their FB Walls a place of temporal comfort. Like cleaning up someone’s bedroom or closet, taking down a FB page can be difficult and full of confusing emotions.. Will we also say that a person feels like they have truly “passed” when we not only attend the funeral and see the body, but when his/her FB page is finally taken down?
Hmmm… yet another whole other post.
-imei