Gah! Facebook has decided to party like it’s 2008 and revamp the relationship status function (remember when updating your status to It’s Complicated caused enough intrigue in your friendship group to last a fortnight?).
Zuckeberg, in his infinite wisdom, has introduced an ‘ask’ button to your relationship status, presumably so that potential paramours can check you’re not seeing anyone before they send you an unsolicited cock picture, and so that nosey elderly relatives can ask what happened to that nice young man you went out with in your first year at uni.
We’ve also heard rumours that poking is suddenly back on the agenda (because again let’s face it, in those heady early days of Facebook, getting a poke from a boy you fancied was worth ten Tinder matches from total strangers now).
Which makes us wonder, are we going to stop using Facebook to keep in touch with our mum’s second cousin who lives in Australia and go back to using it to crack onto fit, almost-strangers we met once at a house party?
But the thing is, updating your Facebook relationship status is dead passé nowadays. The last time we saw anyone update theirs to ‘it’s complicated’ was when a middle-aged colleague decided it was a good way to announce their upcoming divorce.
And how many of you are still in a joke relationship with your best friend from six years ago, that neither of you can extricate yourself from, for fear of causing offence (breaking up with your BFF on Facebook so you could be in an actual relationship with your new boyfriend was a cardinal friendship sin in the late noughties)?
So if you want to use Facebook to find love (or a shag) in the futuristic dystopia that is 2014, there are some new ‘rules’ to follow. And we mean ‘rules’ in the loosest sense of the word...
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Don’t ‘be’ in a relationship on Facebook. Much has changed in the last 10 years, but breaking up with someone all over everyone’s news feed is still about the saddest thing you can do.
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Use poking wisely and sparingly. Only poke someone you really, really fancy as a way of starting a conversation. Never poke the same person more than once without a response. Just because you’re a woman, doesn’t mean you can’t be a virtual sex pest.
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Don’t have an otherwise private, sexually charged conversation with the person you’re trying to sleep with on your wall. This was fine when your 73 Facebook friends were all from your uni halls. Now your Aunty Carol’s on there, you might want to take it to the DMs*.
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If you haven’t got the stomach for poking, but want to let someone know you’re interested, simply go through their old Facebook pictures and like a few choice snaps retrospectively. This works particularly well if they’re a new friend, and it’s an excellent way of saying, ‘I’ve just spent my Sunday morning trawling through five years of your pictures. BECAUSE I FANCY YOU.’ Without, you know, actually saying it.
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Messaging someone on Facebook is, as ever, a great way of starting a conversation. Do you know what’s not cool? Sending someone you don’t know that well six messages in quick succession at 2pm on a Wednesday and then finishing it off with a whiney, ‘Why aren’t you answering? Are you pissed off with me?’ No dickwad, they’ve been too busy getting a 20-minute bollocking from their manager to respond and your messages popping up on their phone every 23 seconds isn’t helping matters.
Follow Rebecca on Twitter @rebecca_hol
**We’ve heard that some couples are getting round this by posting loving/sexy messages on each others walls in Vietnamese, using Google translate. Don’t do this. Everyone else will feel compelled to also hit the translate button, and will hate you more for your self-satisfied, coupley smugness/be quite shocked at how filthy you are in Vietnamese. *
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.