Facebook is making it even easier for you to stalk your ex and cry into a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s when you see just how happy he/she is with their new paramour.
At the beginning of this month, Facebook, adamant as ever on ruining our virtual lives, announced the advent of “Us” pages. Much like the “Friendship” pages, which emerged in Facebook’s pre-Timeline yesteryear, these “Us” pages chronicle couples’ relationships from the time they virtually met to their present, cheesy state of being.
In other words, the single world is about to lose it. As if Valentine’s Day weren’t enough, we are now bombarded online with the message: You must have a significant other to be worth something.
But wait, there’s more. Couples can edit their “Us” pages to show when and where exactly they met and can even change their cover photo. Oh, and did I forget to mention you can look up past relationships? It’s true. I tried it, warranting incredibly embarrassing results. Every single post, photo and comment between me and my ex was still there — a virtual record of our time together, and eventually, our demise.
But there are, apparently, upsides of this new addition to Facebook.
“I think it’s a good way to look back on the relationship, and even for other people to get to know the couple,” said Kim Knipe, a senior English and criminology and criminal justice major, who is in a relationship. “Later down the road, it could be good for finding pictures for an engagement party or even ideas for gifts.”
Yes, the one redeeming quality of these Facebook “Us” pages is they are able to provide a good resource for engagement party planners.
It seems these pages are yet another way technology is changing the landscape of relationships and dating. Before texting and social media, couples could live their lives apart from each other, and doing so was rather normal. Yet relationships changed with texting, as they will with “Us” pages.
Now, couples must realize their relationships have taken on a whole new public persona — a post on Facebook, a photo they take — everything is curated in one place. A couple now has people to impress, which can quickly give way to an “our love is better than your love” kind of attitude on Facebook.
Not to mention, some of the autonomy of each person in the relationship is lost. They are now the couple, rather than the individual — a “we” instead of a “me.”
Things are different for singletons, too. As we ponder dating someone, we can not only follow their past in the form of photos and posts on Facebook, but we can also see how they behaved when it came to past relationships. Was he clingy? Was she the jerk in the relationship? Facebook can clear that up.
The truth is, though, as many of us have already learned, Facebook is no true gauge for who a person is in real life. Nor should it be a gauge for what a couple is in real life. Couples shouldn’t feel like they have to present themselves any differently online than they already do.
While the “Us” pages are another obnoxious manifestation of the relationship-oriented culture we live in, their power to change the landscape of relationships can be curbed, so long as we choose to ignore them.
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