Fighting on facebook

I don’t think i’ve ever seen a real couple fight on facebook. What I have seen is couples be quite playful with each other via facebook. Commentaries if you will.

And thankfully this seems to be sort of true for the not-even-married-yet couple who are featured as facebook fighters.

Ms. Andrews shares her fiancé’s view. “A lot of people aren’t with us if we have a fight at home,” she said. This way, “All our friends can kind of comment on it.”

For the record, both Mr. Gower and Ms. Andrews say they are happy together and anticipate marital bliss. They find their Facebook parrying hilarious, and are not bothered by any loss of privacy

The article reads pretty alarming (to me) for a while, but then suggests that for them it’s playful too.

And doing so publicly and allowing other people to comment, perhaps that’s got some advantages. An arbitration process of sorts. (This is not dissimilar from a new television show in the United States called the Marriage Ref, featured on page 2 and which I have seen, where couples feature an argument and have a panel of three judges decide who is correct. Of course the panelists are famous and the couple get prizes for participating, so it might be preferable to be on television, but how many people can get onto television you see?).

And perhaps this is still better than the stuff posted on lamebook (warning: some adult material features there, and possibly things you’ll find tasteless even if you’re over 18…).

But marriage counselors don’t recommend it, they think that

But rather than win support, fighting in front of your friends will more likely convince them that you shouldn’t be together in the first place, marriage counselors say. That certainly seems to be the case among friends of Facebook fighters, who, like any witnesses to a public spat, are caught in the middle, unsure whether to intervene or mind their own business.

I’ve not yet had that experience. I’ve definitely seen couples tease each other, but I’ve always thought it was funny. Perhaps I’m just not serious enough. And surely couples teasing each other is actually rather endearing, a sign of familiarity and playfulness, and I for one find it smile-worthy when I see it going on.