Classic Hacks: Disable Your Relationship Status On Facebook

Back in 2008 we taught you how to disable your relationship stat on Facebook, so when you ended a relationship the social networking site didn’t decide to beam the news to every single one of your friends.

Facebook image via Shutterstock

Thankfully Facebook has become a little more sensitive since then, with more options for you to avoid sticky situations with exes and relationships that didn’t quite work out. As a default, changing your relationship status from “in a relationship” to “single” now won’t post anything to your timeline. Additionally, if you don’t want the fact that you are single (or in a relationship) to be visible to anyone who chooses to look, you can set the privacy on your relationship status to “only me”.

A great trick for those who are single on Facebook is to set your status to “in a relationship” and then set the privacy to “only me” — thereby avoiding both Facebook’s terrible targeted ads for dating sites and your friends’ uncomfortable probing questions.

If you’ve been through a nasty break-up and you don’t really want to see a particular person’s face ever again, Facebook has added a feature that will let you block them not only from your current profile, but from your memories as well. In Facebook’s On This Day page, you can select certain people to block from your memories entirely — any photo or post with them will not be brought up on your timeline again.

Alternatively, you can just block On This Day from ever coming up again:

Lifehacker’s Classic Hacks is a new regular segment where we dig up the most popular, useful and offbeat advice from our archives and update it for your modern lifestyle.


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