Not long ago, I logged onto Facebook and started browsing through my newsfeed. I was greeted with a post from a girlfriend to her boyfriend that went something like this:

“‘A relationship is like a rose, how long it lasts, no one knows. Love can erase an awful past, Love can be your’s, you’ll see, at last. To feel that love, it makes you sigh, To have it leave, you’d rather die. You hope you’ve found that special rose, “cause you love and care for the one you choose”. –Rob Cella.’ I love you, baby. I want to be with you forever.”

I cringed. The idea of posting a message so intimate and mushy on someone else’s wall, for all the world to see, shocked me. “If she was going to say that, why didn’t she text it to her boyfriend?” I thought. “Or even Facebook messaged him.” Given several other private options, why did this girl choose to display her declaration of love in a public way, on a Facebook wall?

It turns out that the notion of making Facebook a public destination for relationships was not unique to her. Facebook, itself, is keen on the idea.

For any couple listed on Facebook as being in a relationship, the platform now provides a joint page to view the couple’s history. Simply sign in and visit www.facebook.com/us (a telling name) to view your joint page with your significant other. This archive of a couple’s relationship provides their wall posts to each other, photos together, a pool of mutual friends, the events they have both attended, and their shared “likes” and interests on Facebook.

Any friend of both users can view this page by selecting the “View Friendship” option and inputing the names of both members of the couple.

This strikes me as a bit…well, creepy. It feels as if Facebook is forcing a public aspect on Facebook relationships that may make people like me, who think that relationships are a private matter, not a public spectacle, cringe.

Perhaps to many couples, the relationship page is endearing; they may find it cute and helpful. And thats wonderful – but Facebook, in its characteristic way, did not provide the tools to have such a page and allow couples to opt in and opt out. It forced the feature on everyone listed in a relationship.

But if you want to avoid the new feature, you can just end your relationship on Facebook, right? Not so fast. Don’t forget that Facebook does not seem to allow you any mechanism to avoid posting the news of your break up all over your newsfeed. You might not want that headache either.

The girl who posted that mushy paragraph on her boyfriend’s wall was acting of her own volition. But it seems to me that public romantic relationships is something that Facebook really seems to encourage (or force) among its users. Maybe for the spectacle? Perhaps it seeks to make Facebook that much more addictive, by adding the unpredictable spectacle of human relationships to the mix.