Friendster and relationships

I have to say, I'm a big fan of Friendster. You can use it to track down old friends you haven't seen since middle-school, keep tabs on if that cute friend of a friend is still in a relationship with that prick from high school, see if your ex's have moved on past you (or so I hear), etc. But recently my friends and I learned of a new, dangerous side-effect of Friendster: it can be a relationship catalyst.

For those who don't know Friendster, you set up a profile about yourself, your interests, and then you link to your friends and their friends, etc. Part of the profile is your marital status, and well, the options are limited to "single," "in a relationship," "domestic partnership," and "married," so if you're in that grey area on the relationship scale it can put you in quite a pickle as friend of mine recently learned when he got the girl he's been seeing to sign up.

I'm including his letter to me below for your own personal amusement/education (the names have been removed).

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Hey,

So I've been getting on [girl]'s case for a while now about getting a picture up that I can show off. Well today I received a friendster request indicating to me that she had posted her pic on the profile she just created. Not bad. A couple of things though:

(1) The picture looks disgusting. Her head is nowhere near that huge, and, if you can believe it, she actually looks better with her glasses on. Goddammit! Oh well.

(2) If you look over in the status section as I did, you may be surprised (I sure as fuck was) to see it lists her as being in a relationship. That's news to me! What a crappy way to get the news, no?

Then again, after taking some time to think about it after the initial paralyzing fear owing to my commitment-phobic youthful hedonism, I thought: that makes sense. I mean, on her end. What's she going to write, "single"? She sleeps over all the time and I see her naked regularly. It makes sense, but irritates me that there are so few options on friendster for this. So basically because of friendster, I'm now apparently in a relationship. Should they have more options? Should you be encouraged to wear that much of your life on your sleeve? That's a lot of profile updates if they have the level of detail down to as fine a grain as

Status: talking to someone; seeing someone; dating someone; in a relationship; living with someone; married; blah blah blah

I don't know, I wish I could sue friendster for this, but obviously not.

You should see it for yourself though.

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Kev's follow-up: When I complained about the options to Friendster in a tongue-in-cheek letter (I was bored one night and had some wine -- ok, a lot of wine) they let me know that they agreed with me and decided to change the scale to now include, "it's complicated" as an option.

Great -- I'm not really sure I want people to associate me with "it's complicated," but it would be pretty-damn fitting.