The Facebook dynamic and relationships | What you’re allowed to do on Facebook when you’re single, dating or in a relationship.

Facebook, the online social utility, serves many purposes. You can keep up-to-date on your friends activities, receive birthday notifications for upcoming birthdays, and even buy them virtual gifts to brighten up someones day. On Facebook, the sky is the limit on the amount of things you can do to create and maintain relationships with people.

However, the opportunity to substitute Facebook for real-life maintenance of the relationships we build with people can become well too abundant. Facebook’s main purpose in my opinion is to manage your contacts of friends. If that is the case, then why is there a “relationship status” field you ask? It must be because some people actually use it to find a date or match for themselves. The only problem is, some people are incorrectly using it. In this post, we look at males that are single, dating and in a relationship and examine the common pitfalls that they find themselves getting into.

Using Facebook if you’re single.

Guys, if you’re single, it’s probably the case that you are in the market to get yourself involved with someone. Do you think you should state your relationship status as ‘Single’ for the world to see? Come on now, you know better than that! What are you trying to accomplish by stating that you’re single? Do you think it sends pheremonal signals to the opposite sex to say WOAH HE’S SINGLE I’m going to go after him. No it doesn’t. What it really says, is “hey I’m single and looking for the next available opportunity, and I’ll pretty much take whatever I can get”. Unless you’re in the top 1% of good looking males, you shouldn’t put your relationship status as “single”.

One dynamic that you have to understand is that men and women are different. Myself personally, and men for the most part won’t go after a girl that is taken. It’s not attractive at all. Women are different, they are usually in competition with their female counterparts and find it intriguing to pursue a man that is taken. How intriguing are you to let the girl know that you’re single and available when ready? Yeah, not so much.

In fact, I would advise not to put your relationship status on Facebook if you’re single because it shows weakness. No girl likes to be around a weak man. Every time I see someone with a single status, I’m like, REALLY? Why are you putting that on your profile, you’re weak.

It’s more mysterious to have people wondering what your current status is. Is he seeing someone? Is he trying to attract a girl? Is he playing the field? The mystery of finding this out is pretty attractive in my mind. Everyone loves a good mystery so why not give people the challenge in figuring your mystery out?

Let’s play your game for a second though, because we all love a good joke. Let’s say you are single and do decide to divulge this information on your profile. What do you think will happen? Do you think a girl is going to see that, and send you a private message to say “hey hottie, I see that you’re single, maybe we should hook up, what are you doing tonight?”. Even if a girl finds you attractive, she’ll never do that.

If you did an analysis and comparison between women and men and who states their relationship as “Single“, you will see that men are more likely to do this over women. What does that say about us men? It says we don’t know what the hell we’re doing.

Using Facebook if you’re dating.

I classify dating as going out with people and playing the field. You are not just seeing one person and the people you are seeing understand that you have multiple people that you are going out with. If they don’t know that you are seeing other people it also falls into this category, however, you are a jerk for not being up front about it. If you’re into the dating scene, it’s more than likely that you don’t have your status filled in because sometimes you’re not even sure what state of the relationships you are in sometimes!

Having said that, when you’re dating someone, I highly advise not to add that person to Facebook at the beginning stages of the pursuit/courtship. The most precious and memorable things that you can discover about people are done in person. Would you rather find out that you have things in common with her through her Facebook or actually getting the “oh really? You did that TOO? You’re awesome!” feeling when you realize that the person you’re talking to has so much in common with you. The faster you add someone to Facebook, the faster it is that you will get yourself friend zoned. Let the mystery be the journey that takes you where you want to go. Discovering people you like is like reading an extremely good book: it’s something you don’t want to stop and put down because it gets better and better as you get further and further into it.

In fact, I’ll go to the extreme and say you should never add a girl you like to Facebook. Let her add you. If she adds you, it means she wants to find out more information about you and that she is intrigued. If she doesn’t add you, she’s not thinking about you. If you get a hot girl adding you to Facebook, that’s like drinking premium brand Vodka at the club, none of that dollar store fake stuff that the under aged crowd drinks. Imagine what it’s like to a hot girl. She probably has well over 1000-1500+ friends and people add her pretty much on a daily basis. What do you think it’s like to her when you’re getting to know her for a while and you haven’t added her. She knows she’s hot, so she must be thinking, does this guy not like me since he hasn’t attempted to find out more information about me? She’ll eventually add you if she likes you and wants to get more information on you. If she doesn’t add you, she’s just not that into you.

Using Facebook if you’re in a relationship.

Out of the three categories: single, dating, and being in a relationship, the being “in a relationship” category is the most lenient. You have three options to let people know what your current status is:

1) Don’t state that you are in a relationship

People usually do this when they don’t want people to know something about their relationship. Either they are looking for an upgrade or they want to hide things. There is nothing wrong in not letting people know that you’re in a relationship. Some people value their privacy and only want their closest friends to know if they are involved with someone. However, if you’re in a relationship with a really attractive girl and you two don’t specify that you’re in a relationship, depending on her core values, she may be up willing to take an upgrade at any time. Proceed with caution!

2) State that you’re in a relationship but don’t state who you are in a relationship with.

This is usually done because both people in the relationship have made commitment that they won’t see anyone else. It flags them as unavailable from being pursued. They are off the market but can be persuaded to look the other way for a once in a lifetime opportunity!

3) State that you’re in a relationship and state who you are in a relationship with.

If you’re in a relationship and you state who you are in a relationship with, it is a serious relationship. You both are saying “I’m in a relationship with person X and I want people to know about it”. These relationships usually last for a couple months to years. People don’t usually change their status to this right away either. They wait a couple months to make sure that it’s going somewhere before both people look like fools for being in a relationship one day and being single the next.

So now that you guys have been given a little insight on what you should be doing Facebook as it relates to setting your relationship status, if you are single or dating, make sure you don’t set fill this information in. If you do fill this information in, you’re asking for a first class trip to nowhere!

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# Linked to 8 February 2010 in Articles by Pat Dryburgh

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» Filed Under Relationships, boys, dating, singles