How could just three letters hold so much weight in a relationship? You know what letters I’m talking about right…F, B, and O. Three letters that hold the future to your love life or the end of it. We’ve always grown up thinking everything has to have a label. These labels add a reasoning to who you are and what you’re doing, but just like many other labels we have sworn off in our society, why is this “FBO” label so important?
It seems that most of us are either too quick or too hesitant to take on the responsibilities of an official relationship, and what determines an official relationship? Well apparently it is whether or not it’s plastered all over your Facebook timeline. Why is that the case? Has social media become that important that we let it determine whether our relationships are legitimate or not?
Frankly, I think being “FBO” just adds more drama to a situation that needs the least amount of drama. Half of the time people are scared to commit while the other half need that FBO title for reassurance, whatever the situation may be, a relationship status on you Facebook profile does not signify anything about your relationship. Can your FBO status tell you how happy you are, how in love you are, how absolutely uncertain you are about the person that you’re in a relationship with? From what I can see, it doesn’t.
Everyone reads way too much into becoming Facebook official. If you do it then everyone knows you’re in a relationship, congrats! If you don’t do it, but you’ve been with the same person faithfully for the past four months, congrats! You’re still in a relationship! Surprised? I know, it’s a crazy concept, but the fact is there does not need to be a label to be in a happily committed relationship, there doesn’t need to be a label on anything to be happily committed to anything! Think about what life was like when Facebook didn’t even exist. No one was “FBO” and from what I can see that hasn’t drastically affected previous generations. I don’t see our parents wishing that they could have been FBO with their exes from college. We have let this idea of everything needing to be perfectly labeled and laid out for us take control over all of our decisions. We look at every possible outcome and every possible gritty detail, to only make ourselves seem more psychotic than we actually are. We are driving ourselves insane, with what we “think” should happen or what we “think” should be the perfect relationship.
Being “in a relationship with..” someone on Facebook is not the end all be all. It is not the defining factor of whether or not you’re in a healthy, happy, in-it-for-the-long-haul relationship. It’s just another thing to add in your “about” section on your Facebook page.
We don’t let people label us as individuals anymore, we’ve rose above the name-calling or the stereotypes, at least I would hope, so why are we giving social media the control to label other aspects of our life?
