Relationship Pages Means Couples Can Go By “We” On Facebook Just Like In Real Life

Let’s make this clear right off the bat: It’s totally acceptable and normal to refer to your relationship as a “we”  when the situation calls for it. But we all know those couples who seem to have shed any pretense of separate identities and go around “we’ing” the bejeezus out of every conversation. That’s now possible in online world with Facebook’s new “relationship” pages starring you and your main squeeze as the happy “we” that you are.

Already on Facebook you can view your virtual past with any of the friends on your list, but these couple pages take that to a whole new level. The page features posts tagged with both people in the relationship, events they participated in and of course, your history in photographs.

As CNN points out, this is bringing up a lot of emotional bile for those out there who would rather not engage in the whole “we” culture — including those who are in relationships and have no interest in having their relationships boiled down to yet another Facebook page to be liked, viewed and judged.

The difference between these new pages and a basic “here’s how you relate to Friend X pages is that your relationship will now redirect to a Facebook.com/us page. A page that can’t be deleted.

Facebook’s Jessie Baker told CNN:

“You cannot deactivate the pages, but you can control what you share on Facebook using the privacy settings for each post. The friendship page respects the privacy setting of each post. This means the person viewing the friendship page may see each post elsewhere on Facebook, like on either friend’s timeline or in news feed. You can curate your friendship page by hiding stories you do not want to appear. As a reminder, selecting to ‘hide’ an object from your timeline or friendship page does not remove it from Facebook, and the object may show up in other places such as news feed. If you would like to remove a story you posted from Facebook altogether, you can do so by selecting delete post or untagging yourself from photos.”

So you can’t ever get rid of it, but you can manually go through and hide every single thing you might want to keep private — and we’re guessing everything that shows up there will be set on a default setting to show “Everyone.”

Whatever happened to Facebook trying to respect the privacy of its users or perhaps giving them a decision to opt out of the online “we” in the first place?

What do you think?

Some irked by Facebook’s new pages for couples [CNN]

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