The Facebook Debate

I had thought about how to approach a particular topic for a while and had spent many email hours polling my friends on their opinions. But really, it would just be me doing the asking when I finally wound up my courage, which I managed to do this weekend.

I was sitting with my sweetheart on his bed in his parents’ house, where we were taking a break from cleaning out the shop that holds, among other things, his dad’s car restoration projects and a keg of beer. I faced him with some trepidation and told him I had a really stupid question to ask him. He looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t even look him in the face as I asked:

Will you be my boyfriend on facebook?

Oy vey. My mortification knew no bounds.

I had been chasing my metaphorical tail on this for a long time, well before my boyfriend became my boyfriend (both on and off facebook—and for the record, I know these two phenomena are very different). On the one hand, I fully recognize that making it (cringe) “facebook official” has very little to do with the actual emotional life and reality of a relationship. If the electronic status of your partnership is the glue, there are significantly larger problems afoot. Mark Zuckerburg does not make your relationship real; you and your partner do.

So why, why if I knew all of these things did I still want it so badly?

It isn’t as though I’m insecure about my sweetheart’s affections. I am not, and have not been, lacking in reassurance from him. He challenges me when I need challenging, and he supports me when I need supporting. His Monday morning texts cause me to start my week with a really dopey smile on my face. But it’s also nice that he refers to me as his girlfriend, and that his friends and family know about me. I love that I am in the public record of his life as he is in mine. While I believe that wanting his friends and family to know I exist as his girlfriend is reasonable, the facebook debate takes a few steps beyond and treads suspiciously outside reason.

Facebook played an odd role in my college socialization. Early on freshman year, a friend of mine asked me if I had signed up, and the blank look I gave her indicated that I hadn’t. She immediately helped me set up my profile. I am one of those unfortunate people who have to make a conscious effort not to talk about myself all the time (and I often fail at that—blog much?). But here was this website that was inviting me to do so. I wondered at the time if people actually cared that I love Cheez-its and biking, and the answer was “no, probably not.” That question, however, has become obsolete in the brave new world of facebook and twitter. In the early days of facebook, during which time I joined, the website was restricted to college students only, and we stalked one other with alarming energy—indeed, we adopted “stalk” as our verb of choice, as if that weren’t indicative of some very weird cultural changes. Sometime before graduation, the site opened to non-college email addresses, and the deluge of high schoolers (disturbing) and then parents (even more disturbing) began. I think I entered into a new realm of weird when my grandmother friended me.

Something tells me that my desire to have people know that I am in a relationship finds its origins much, much earlier than facebook, but the current culture of (over)sharing has certainly encouraged my preexisting leanings and insecurities. I’ve had two boyfriends in the past who withheld (as it were) on facebook to varying degrees. The first was so loathe to even hold my hand in public that an expectation to declare couple-hood online must have been appalling to him. When I step back and look at the bigger picture of that particular relationship, I realize that the facebook relationship wasn’t what I was looking for necessarily; I was looking for any kind of validation, any freely given gesture of affection that might indicate that—for whatever reason—he was the other half of a couple, that I wasn’t just making this up.

In a way, the facebook relationship status is just that: a culturally idiosyncratic gesture of affection, rather than a public declaration of exclusivity. My sweetheart is seldom on facebook, so it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to update his profile, but when I asked him, burying my head in a pillow so that my words came out a bit muffled, he smiled and said, “Of course.”

What he did in that moment was not decide he wanted to announce to the social networking world that we were a couple. He decided that this thing that was not a big deal to him was, for whatever reason, important to this crazy girl of whom he is very fond. And so he gave it freely, probably a small thing to him but a big deal to me—whether that is reasonable or not was sort of a moot point.

In the ever expanding, networked universe in which we find ourselves, my own insecurities have been given a whole new stage on which to play out their varying dramas. I am reminded of a good line from an unfortunate movie in which Drew Barrymore laments, “I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It's exhausting.” The weirdest part of hearing that line was that I knew exactly what she was talking about. I am often ambivalent about technology, but I have zero ambivalence towards a miraculous phenomenon that I’m sure has been played out for centuries before Mark Zuckerburg was ever born:

The insecure half of a couple seeks an odd form of validation from the other half of the couple, who, being very kind and almost shockingly insightful, gives this validation freely. And suddenly there is a significant change in status—internal, facebook, or otherwise:

Insecure half is… very happy, very grateful, and—by the way—in a relationship.