No, she won't go "Facebook Official" with you
"Dating isn't dead, it's just changed names!" So the newspapers reassure us. Don't blame today's "hookup culture" on Web-driven moral decay or the rapid-thumbed narcissism of the Youngs. The Internet has actually saved romance. "They may not call it 'dating,' but they still 'go out,'" a Contra Costa Times reporter explains. "And when it gets serious enough, they announce it online and become 'Facebook official.'" Facebook has saved dating? Fine, one fewer thing to blame Sheryl Sandberg for. But it's still not true.Facebook's most hardcore users — young men pretending not to be looking for sex — can now mark their latest target as theirs in public. But this is no great victory, for women or for dating. Or, for that matter, for them. For one, it kills their prospects of picking up someone new as a stopgap before their current relationship fails. Unless they can somehow convince their current partner that really, talking about one's relationship in public is only for cads and showoffs, and she's gullible enough to agree. Even if they do "cancel" their relationship — to use Facebook's lingo — between tagged photos and archived News Feed items, users can no longer count on the one thing that fuels serial monogamy — consensual amnesia. What we can credit Facebook for, maybe, isn't saving romance. But it is saving a little bit of our honesty.