Beth Granter

Freelance digital consultant for charities


Keeping my blog at WordPress and Facebook relationship options


So I’m probably going to keep my blog at WordPress and just add some more pages to it because it doesn’t seem worth the complications of leaving a dead blog here and trying to get people to read at my new location etc.

Apart from that, I had reason to edit my Facebook relationship status recently and noticed something missing – the options are:

  • Single
  • In a relationship
  • Engaged
  • Married
  • It’s complicated and
  • In an open relationship.

So I have a couple of friends who are married AND in an open relationship. So they’re now forced to choose whether to represent themselves online as married OR as in an open relationship, whereas offline they are both. The couple I’m thinking of have decided to put ‘In an open relationship’ as it happens. But I wondered if this caused them any dilemma or if they had an issue with that.

Facebook probably thought they were being quite liberal by even offering the open relationship option, but maybe a blank text box would be better, so people could define their relationship however they chose to.

The only problem with that would be for the purposes of searching for people with a specific relationship setting, because there would be so much variety in the way people described their relationships. But why would anyone search for people based on their relationship setting? Apart from if they were trying to search for someone to date and wanted to search for ‘single’ people, but why would anyone ever want to do a search for married people for example? Or people in a relationship?

The other thing is – what about people in poly relationships? What if someone had a 3-way (or more) relationship and wanted to express that on their profile?


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