The Status Update

I just very recently updated my Facebook profile for no reason other than the fact that I felt like it and, like most 20-somethings who grew into almost-adulthood with Facebook (I was a freshman in college when Facebook first came to be the social phenomenon that rules the world of college students, post-college students, pre-college students, siblings of college students, parents of college students and even parents of parents of college students), part of my identity is tied into what my Facebook profile states about me.

Just this week, for example, I've let people know that I'm simultaneously living like a preschooler, taking mid-morning naps, while toiling away like an adult workaholic who puts in 52 hours within five days. I've also posted three fairly-well written and exciting blog posts (Okay, so I know that my tax blog was haphazardly thrown together and is more of a rant than anything else, but what are you going to do?). And I've also, as mentioned in the previous graf (Ooooh look at me using journalism lingo like I'm a real, live journalist),  updated my profile: I added my receptionist position at Whole Family Wellness under my jobs, updated my favorite TV shows, added Neighborhood Notes into my web sites box and, without much hesitation or thought, changed my relationship status from "single" to "in a relationship."

All I can say is holy cow. As someone who produces reading content for other people, I like to think that I have some grasp on what people find enjoyable to read. I mean, a person can fundamentally be a great writer -- he can have such beautiful sentence structure that it makes you weak at the knees (That person for me, by the way, is T.C. Boyle) or she can be such a master of grammar and punctuation that any deviation from the technical rules of writing is unbelievably powerful (I know I'm a parentheses  and dash abuser, thus making my favorite punctuations almost annoying at times) -- and produce boring content that people still read. Other writers can have really interesting subjects but have such awful writing abilites that attempting to get through a sentence makes your ears and eyes bleed (Ahhh memories of editing articles at the Beacon and during my stint at the Writing Center). I think that I'm somewhere in between those polarities; I think I produce flowing sentences with enough wit and interesting content but still struggle with organization and, as this blog post is evidence for, random rambling.

Or so I thought. For all of the articles I find in the New York Times or Oregonian or OPB, all of the blog posts, all of the status updates about both wonderful and awful things that have happened to me, I have never, EVER received as much feedback as I did when I changed my relationship status. Who knew that my love life was so interesting to others? I most certaintly didn't; in fact, my status hadn't been changed for 30 minutes before I had three comments and a friend Facebook chatting with me about my new beau. The response befuddled me, to be honest.

But then I slept on it and thought about this so-called phenomenon a bit more. People like romance and love and happy endings. As humans, we crave companionship and enjoy watching or reading about others going through strife, whether it's serious or comical (Yes, I'm differentiating between your typical chick flick and romcom) and still finding each other in the end. Heck, most of my favorite novels are about two people falling in love: Pride and Prejudice, The English Patient (Okay so they don't end up together; whatever) and Walk Two Moons, to name a few. I think that we enjoy being a part of romance because it makes us forget about the less-than-great things in life (death and clowns in my case) because we know that somewhere out there, two people are happy.

I'm figuring that's what the 14 people who have since commented on my relationship status update are feeling anyway. And that's okay.

Just don't expect gushy details any time soon. A girl doesn't kiss and tell, after all.