Catherine White and her fiance, Fred Levine, share a page on Facebook. She hopes that sends a message to any of his old flames who may look him up on the popular social networking Web site.
"Some of them still reach out to him to check his status," said White, of Danville, N.H., via Facebook. "There are a lot of ladies out there looking for a man in our age group, the 40s and 50s. It's very cut-throat."
Being up-front about your personal status on Facebook is not a bad idea when it comes to warding off that green monster from your relationship.
All this friending, poking and picture-posting certainly can get you in trouble with your significant other. And with the rise in popularity of Facebook, therapists and other experts are finding that old flames and flirty friends have a unique ability to stir jealousy and suspicion.
"There is tremendous potential," said Joe Cotton, chief executive officer of the Psychological Center in Lawrence.
Part of the problem, he said, is that people lose inhibitions on Facebook, sharing more freely with a computer screen to hide behind than they might in a face-to-face situation.
Founded in 2004 by Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates, Facebook today has exploded in popularity. According to the company's published press statistics, Facebook now has more than 300 million active users. Of those, 50 percent log onto their Facebook page every day, and people 35 and older are the fastest growing user demographic.
Since more than 8 billion minutes are spent worldwide on Facebook every day, there's plenty of time to find old and make new "friends" — to the tune of an average of 130 per user. The program allows people to post publicly and chat privately, upload videos and photos, send "gifts," "drinks," "hugs," and many, many more niceties.
All that adds up to a lot more interaction with people outside a relationship than one could possibly manage without Facebook's help — and a lot of potential arguments.
"From what I found, from what I have read, and from what I have seen, people post things they shouldn't be," Cotton said.
It's the same age-old phenomenon of jealousy, with all kinds of brand-new provocations. Those prone to jealousy can now add a questionable comment on their partner's wall, or a "tagging" (becoming identified) in a photo from an old relationship to things that make them fume.
Even couples who keep separate pages can see all such activity on one another's pages — known as "walls." Unless of course they aren't "friends," or have gone to steps to hide certain communications, both of which might indicate relationship trouble of their own.
"It seems like Facebook is creating jealousy even where there was not jealousy to begin with," said Amy Muise, a doctoral candidate in Canada at the University of Guelph's psychology department.
Muise recently headed up a study on how Facebook can spark jealousy in romantic relationships among college students.
Her findings, she said, are that Facebook doesn't necessarily make people more jealous than they would be normally. But all of the information divulged on Facebook — those answers to "What's on your mind?" and reactions to those posts — can increase "triggers" for jealousy.
"Part of the issue with information on Facebook is that it lacks certain context," Muise said. "So there could be things posted on your partner's wall that you really don't know what they mean."
The study was based on anonymous online survey data from 308 undergraduate Facebook users, three quarters of them women.
The study, published in CyberPsychology & Behavior, found Facebook users can get snagged in a "feedback loop." For partners in a relationship, this could take the form of their interest being piqued by a cryptic wall comment, becoming suspicious and starting to monitor their partner's page, and thus finding even more suspicious information.
Dan Fitzsimmons, a 21-year-old University of Albany student, said he has had to explain Facebook photos to girlfriends in the past.
Samantha Siciliano, an incoming freshman at Quinnipiac University from North Adams, Mass., said she became jealous over the back-and-forth on her old boyfriend's wall, especially from too-friendly comments like, "You look cute."
"If your boyfriend is calling or texting another girl, you can't really see it. But on Facebook, you can see it and so can everyone else," Siciliano said. "So in a way, you do get jealous because he might be hanging his dirty laundry, and not only are you seeing it, but other people are, too."
Colin Booth of West Virginia University said he is not the jealous type, but finds it a strange, modern phenomenon to watch your girlfriend develop other relationships in real time on Facebook.
"It's been happening forever. You're with a girl, she meets a guy, they're friends at first," Booth said. "But it's the way you see it and what you see. And then you think: 'What's going on under the surface if this is what's going on in public?'"
Laney Cohen, a 24-year-old who works in public relations in New York City, has a longtime boyfriend now in law school in Florida. She began noticing last year that her boyfriend was being tagged in photographs with a female friend who "kind of rubs me the wrong way." One picture in particular upset her: The pair were in a bar, and the woman was looking up at Cohen's boyfriend.
"I felt that it was a very couple-y picture to be in, and I freaked out and I called him and said, 'This is disrespectful to me and our relationship. What if people start asking questions about why you're always hanging out with her?'" Cohen recalled.
This is not just a problem for young people, especially as more middle-aged people get on Facebook. Cohen said her father, after 29 years of marriage, was tagged in a 32-year-old photo by a former girlfriend.
Cohen's mother was amused, however, not upset.
Muise said researchers are just beginning to learn all of the ways social networking sites are changing the way couples relate. She cited the case of a young woman who found out her boyfriend broke up with her when she noticed he had changed his relationship status to "single."
For her part, Cohen said she and her boyfriend worked out their photo-tagging issue.
"He's either untagging photos or not showing up in the photos anymore," she said. "Either way is fine."
In a perfect world, Cotton said, people would think before they post and realize how public virtual liaisons can harm their private real relationships.
"But everybody is human, that is the way it goes," he said. "It's not a perfect world."
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
