Facebook Official: 2 FB or Not 2 FB.

Facebook Official (adj): The ultimate definition of a college relationship - when on one's Facebook profile it says "In a Relationship" and your significant other's name. ( via UrbanDictionary.com )

Sometimes it's a little hard to take UrbanDictionary seriously; it, to dictionaries, is what Wikipedia is to encyclopedias. Part of it is absolute nonsense, and everyone knows it.

But "Facebook Official" is a term that's thrown around as much offline as it is on the Web. I've heard it in passing conversation, in large groups of friends, in the classroom, and even to me personally. While in high school I started seeing someone and my friend Tanya, when I told her, asked me why I hadn't "made it official" on Facebook. "You're not doing it right," she said, and she meant it. "You have to make it official on Facebook, otherwise it doesn't count."

It's no secret that people are as rounded on the Internet these days as they are in person. People have entire personalities on the Web that their relatives, classmates, and close friends may know nothing about ( see the case of Autumn Edows from the Frontline documentary Growing Up Online. ) Excluding information from these online identities, then, is as serious a decision as buying a first car: Should I use my full last name, or just an initial? Should I say which college I go to? How many pictures should I put up? Can I trust all my online friends with my phone number?

Taking priority over these things, though, is the notion of attaching oneself to a romantic interest, even if only in hyperlink form. Whether this comes from mainstream media pushing love and romance or from somewhere else, "Facebook Official" isn't likely to be going away any time soon.

The formation and maintenance of relationships through the use of social networking sites is documented in a 2009 study by Mark Urista, Qingwen Dong, and Kenneth Day, proving that social network users aren't just arbitrarily firing shots into cyberspace. If Facebook, a website with over 300 million registered users, can be broken down into five main gratifications, it's more than a coincidence that I was cornered and demanded of, "Why didn't you make it official on Facebook?

Facebook officialness comes with some drawbacks, in my opinion. I've seen friends meet people they become romantically interested in, but they've chosen to not "pursue" a relationship because on Facebook the other person is either listed as seeing someone else or hasn't input an answer at all. Even worse, I know of people who decide to not pursue even a friendship based on this virtual link between people.

It leaves me wondering, though, where is the middle ground? If linking oneself to another person's name on Facebook is grounds for losing out on potential friendships, then maybe using the site to say things like that isn't the best idea after all. But if someone is going to wave a paintbrush at me and insist that my relationship doesn't count because there's no HTML code for it, well. . .that's a lot of pressure to click and commit.