Earlier this week, Facebook launched "couples' pages," facebook.com/us, for those social media users blessed enough to be in a real-life relationship.
The joint pages are curated by Facebook and helpfully stream together all the status updates in which partners mention each other, as well as tagged photos, lists of mutual friends, event invites and catalogues of things they both "like." Ralphing yet?
Jennifer Wright at the Gloss may start any moment.
"I want to vomit," the blogger wrote this week. "Basically, I do not think that being a couple turns you into a stick figure with a hybrid thought process (perhaps because, terrifyingly, your brain has become a heart)."
Wright and other haters – singles as well as those ensconced in the warm blanket of coupledom – have piled on the new feature, which actually amounts to little more than a shortcut for the old "see friendship" option, with the cute factor thrown in. (That feature let users track their platonic friendships.)
Still, the nauseous chorus reflects a growing impatience with couples' exhibitionism in general. Similar scorn has been poured on shared e-mail accounts , inexplicably industrial engagement photo shoots and anticipatory wedding blogs. Now it culminates in this, a fully fused day-to-day persona. (Of course, some couples didn't actually wait for Facebook to entangle their pages for them, creating their own Franken-profiles way ahead of the game.)
Part of the terror of the new couples' pages is that Facebook will automatically whip up joint digital profiles for anyone listed in a relationship with another Facebook user – whether you've asked for it or not.
This is not sitting well with some more purportedly discreet husbands and wives, including one "retching" writer at The Telegraph.
"You have infantilized my relationship for me with the creation of www.facebook.com/us. Only I should get to do that. And you may have just forced me, a newlywed, to take finally take the plunge and break up with my husband on Facebook," an indignant Emma Barnett wrote.
So who will actually celebrate their new joint nuptial profile – and will you unfriend them? Are the new couples pages co-dependent?
Zosia Bielski