Facebook Relationship Statuses: It's like a Soap Opera on Your Computer

I would like to find the programmer who came up with the relationship status feature on Facebook and give him a firm handshake for his/her-most likely her-idea to include this feature. Then I want to smack him/her-hopefully him-on the back of the head for actually including this feature.

Watching the relationship status on my Facebook friends sometimes plays out like a romantic comedy or at least an afternoon soap opera. The typical relationship flowchart is boy is single. Boy meets girl. Boy gets in relationship with girl. Boy gets engaged to girl. Boy marries girl. Girl finds various compromising photos of boy on his Facebook gallery. Boy suddenly is single again. Throw in the options of open relationship and it's complicated just to really watch your personal version of a real life soap opera unfold in Facebook. I have seen people discover that they broke up with their significant other with one change of the relationship status. I guess it is easier than the break up text.

Whether single, in a relationship, in an open relationship, engaged, married, widowed, or it's complicated, any public airing of the relationship status feels like a beacon to other users who either have a crush on you, want to dig up dirt on you, want to set you up with one of their friends, or want to barrage you with ads that relate to your relationship status. Damn those ads. When I listed myself in a relationship, I got ads for sites where I could have a fling or affair. When I swapped to single, I got ads for dating sites. I tried engaged and got wedding planning sites. I currently list myself as widowed, though now I get grief counseling or rebound dating ads. I figure if I so much as list myself as it's complicated, I will get bombarded with ads for the It's Complicated DVD. A nice movie, mind you.

When I am not widowed, I just personally keep my status hidden since that is one less piece of information to make public to the Facebook world and one less piece of potential drama to sit through as it changes from single to it's complicated. Speaking of "it's complicated," I did find one Facebook group that pretty much simplifies that term:

If your relationship is "complicated", don't kid yourself, you're single.

About the one complicated relationship I could fathom as being complicated involved one Romeo Montague and one Juliet Capulet.