When Does One Become The Other? ...

The other night, out to dinner with David (yes, another one), the conversation turned to Facebook and its Relationship Statuses.

In your Facebook profile, you can click several options to explain your presence. To wit:

Looking for:
❏ Friendship
❏ Dating
❏ A Relationship
❏ Networking

All righty. But the drop-down menu for Relationship Status offers these options:

Single
In a Relationship
Engaged
Married
It's Complicated
In an Open Relationship

Huh. "Dating" is not an option. The closest thing to "Dating" is "In a Relationship," and yet 4 out of 5 daters will tell you that there might be a world of difference between "Dating" and "In a Relationship."

So when does one become the other? (I don't consider "In an Open Relationship" to be the same as dating. The words "open relationship" imply something much more intentional to me than "dating." They also imply the '70s, but I digress.)

Just as I'm not sure at what point the Dan Ryan becomes the Kennedy, I have no idea when two people cross the figurative line that separates "dating" and "in a relationship." Does the shift in status have something to do with the number of dates? The intensity of the dates? The duration of the dates?

And when it comes to changing the status on your Facebook page, is it akin to a game of Chicken? Do you wait to see if the other person changes the status first and then change yours accordingly? Do you both discuss it beforehand? How do you bring it up? Is it like salary negotiations, a la the person who names a number (or in this case, a relationship label) first loses the upper hand? Is there such a thing as an upper hand in a relationship? Even if it's not yet being called a relationship?

So. Many. Questions.

And so I ask one more: WWJFS?: What Would Jeff Foxworthy Say?

If you have any inkling, please post a comment with your second half of this sentence: "You might be in a relationship if ..."