Everyone knows that being Facebook official is a crucial aspect to every healthy relationship. I mean, what says “I love you” better than posting your current relationship status on your personal page for everyone in the world to see?

Being Facebook official is possibly the stupidest thing I could ever imagine being important in any relationship. Shouldn’t relationships be a private matter? Facebook is just some dumb Web site… who cares?

The two perspectives above represent opposite ends of the spectrum in the digital dating world. Just last year I would have agreed with the first opinion, forcing my boyfriend to publicly profess his undying love for me. At the time, I honestly believed that this was just the right thing to do, no exceptions.

I thought that if he really wanted to be with me, then he should have no problem telling the rest of the world via Facebook. The problem was, he did have a problem with it. He claimed that he just simply did not want to post his private matters on Facebook. My question however was, why then, when he was single, did his relationship status clearly read “SINGLE”? Judging by his explanation it should have said absolutely nothing because being single on Facebook says just as much about a person’s relationship status as being “in a relationship with so and so”.

I argued with him claiming he was embarrassed of our relationship or that he didn’t really want to be in a relationship with me or even that he wanted to appear single to other girls to keep his options open. After being quite upset about this, I confided in a good friend of mine who said, “No one wants to admit it, but yes, being Facebook official means something. It’s the most public domain any of us have. To be comfortable enough to broadcast your relationship with another person on this medium can mean a lot.”

Because I trusted my friend’s opinion, I continued to nag my boyfriend repeatedly, until we finally settled on removing our relationship status from Facebook entirely. I figured having no relationship status was better than having one I was unhappy with. We have since broken up and to this day I am unsure about his intentions for remaining relationship-anonymous on Facebook, although I believe that his motives were innocent.

Because he flat out refused to appease me, I was forced to evaluate why I deemed the words “Kate Krivitzky is in a relationship with so and so” so important. Looking back on it, I realize that being “FB” official is probably not that big of a deal and the only reason I, or anyone else, would feel an undying need to be FB official is out of insecurity.

Instead of universally declaring one rule to follow, in this case I truly believe it is up to each unique individual to decide whether Facebook needs to be involved in his or her love life.

For most people of our generation, Facebook is, as my friend said, “the most public domain any of us have,” and therefore if your significant other is comfortable enough to post your relationship for the world to see, then great. If not, either accept it or talk it out because at its very core, Facebook is still just a website!