The request concerns the love status that Facebook members can choose, currently limited to one person.
Will you soon be able to post a list of your husbands, wives, spouses on Facebook? This is in any case the request made by several American associations to the social network, in a letter relayed by the New York Times. As a reminder, the platform currently allows to display the name of a single person in the category “love situation”.
“By limiting users to a single person mentioned in his or her love situation, non-monogamous individuals are arbitrarily deprived of the opportunity to express all of their relationships on the Facebook application” deplore the twelve associations that signed the letter.
Facebook is studying the issue
Specifically, they ask that each Facebook user should “have the right to specify all of their love and intimate partners, without limit”, mentioning their names in the list related to their love situation.
“Ethical non-monogamy is nothing new, but technologies like the Internet have made it easier for people to create communities and adopt lifestyles that would not have been accepted by our societies before,” analyzes Brett Chamberlin, co-founder of the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-Monogamy, to the New York Times.
When asked about this, a spokesperson of Facebook recalls that the social network already allows to present itself as being in a “free union”, specifying furthermore that the company is studying the request of associations, so that users can establish an unlimited list of spouses or partners.
In the letter, the associations never mention the term of “polygamy”. The latter prefer to use the word “polyamour”in order to avoid any confusion with unions between a husband and several wives, or a wife and several husbands, which could be non-consensual.
