relationship status

It is an age-old story. Boy/girl/* meets boy/girl/*, they go on a few dates, and all seems well. Then one of the two (or three?) brings up a daunting topic: the Facebook Relationship status. This was the case for a man I met during a recent visit to NYC. He had just begun a serious relationship, and everything seemed great from the outside, but he confessed some worry. It seems that the Facebook-based DTR had been less than successful. Thier Facebook statuses defiantly remained "Single" as trouble brewed in paradise.

Why is the Facebook status so important? The DTRs of the past (those between the individuals actually involved) have been replaced with relationship statuses on social networking sites, a virtual equivalent of wearing your beau's team jacket. But where the relationships of our youths could be discarded as easily as the physical emblems that ambiguously represented them, social networking sites eliminate any notion of ambiguity. Even Facebook's status of "it's complicated" seems to cover an ever narrowing range of experience.