WHAT is the sound of an awkward silence on Facebook? If you have to ask, then you probably don't have friends like James Gower and Ashley Andrews, high school sweethearts from Spring, Tex., who are both 22 and engaged to be married this May.

Mr. Gower, a master of the passive-aggressive status update, lobbed this one in January: "How is it my birthday is only one day, but my woman's last a whole damn week?"

Ms. Andrews, seemingly not one to watch a ball go by, took a full swing with this comment: "GET OVER IT!!! UGH!!!!!!"

Mr. Gower replied by calling his fiancée a name that can't be printed here, until the exchange became the social networking equivalent of shattered china at a dinner party.

Eventually, Skyler Hurt, 22, a friend and a bridesmaid, intervened: "Hey, you guys know we can still see this right ...?" ...

But some marriage experts say that taking your disagreements to Facebook, even jokingly, is nothing to LOL about. Instead, the urge to make private disagreements public represents a gradual but significant degradation of our regard for marriage.

"From the Victorian era through the 1950s, marriage was viewed as the source of all safety from a predatory world," said Michael Vincent Miller, a psychologist and the author of the book "Intimate Terrorism: The Crisis of Love in an Age of Disillusion." Striving for that ideal, he said, meant keeping your disagreements private, "to keep a public face of harmony."

But as the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s ushered in a new openness among married couples, "that ideal of marriage began to pass away," he said. Soon, the idea that lovers should present a united front at all times came to seem quaint or even naïve, particularly to a generation raised on Oprah and Jerry Springer.

Labels: culture, Marriage

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