She accepted my Facebook relationship request. When I opened her profile, there it was: in a relationship with me. My name, her profile, exactly what I expected to see.
Then I looked at her profile through an account belonging to a friend of hers. There was nothing about being in a relationship with me.
I could see us. Her friend couldn’t. That was all I actually knew, but my mind got considerably further than that.
The acceptance had seemed straightforward. I sent the request; she accepted it. Seeing my name on her profile made it feel settled. Now I was wondering whether something that looked public to me had a much smaller audience than I’d realized.
I didn’t know why the views were different. A privacy setting might explain it, but I didn’t know which setting, or whether she had chosen it deliberately. I kept coming back to the same uncomfortable detail: she could let me see the relationship while someone else saw no relationship at all.
That possibility hit harder than I expected. I started thinking about blowing up and ending things, even though I still had no explanation for what I’d seen.
There hadn’t been a conversation about it yet. There was just her profile, my name visible from one account, and the blank space where it should have been from the other. I was already thinking about leaving.
