NYTimes: I Need to Vent. Hello, Facebook.

Yet another problem with Facebook - all too easy to share way too much of yourself online, only to be regretted later. And how awkward for all your friends.

I Need to Vent. Hello, Facebook.

At 400 million members, Facebook might just replace restaurants as the
go-to place for couples to cause a scene.

From the article, describing couples who air their dirty laundry of their marital 'spats' or fights on their facebook page - the article calls them 'Facebook fighters':

“…friends of Facebook fighters, who, like any witnesses to a public spat, are caught in the middle, unsure whether to intervene or mind their own business.

“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 “…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.

“Today, popular representations of marriage tend toward “two very self-protective egos at war with one another,” Mr. Miller said, “each wanting vindication and to be right by showing that the other is wrong.”