This week for Social Hour, a question based on Facebook’s new relationship options–and a question that didn’t occur to me to ask until this morning, so we don’t have any responses to share.
Facebook rolled out a few new ways to identify your relationship this week, such as “in a civil union” or “in a domestic partnership.” An unmarried friend, who lives in a state where even civil unions have been democratically sneered at (thanks to a “protect marriage” vote), wondered aloud why anyone would want something that is like a marriage in all ways but name, and not call it marriage. In other words, what he was asking was whether these terms undermine the cause for gay marriage.
Enter counterpoint from another unmarried friend, who immediately started railing about marriage as a fundamentally flawed institution that no one should want in the first place, and civil unions and domestic partnerships should be the norm.
It was an interesting debate, although the two men did not directly debate each other. What do you think of the new Facebook relationship categories? See the Huffington Post article about it here.