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NEW YORK – Jay Lassiter is no longer "in a relationship."

Let's explain that: Lassiter, a media authority for semipolitical campaigns who lives in Cherry Hill, N.J., is ease with his relation of nearly octad years, Greg Lehmkuho. But since Thursday, when Facebook expanded its romantic-status options, Lassiter's strikingness there echoes his relationship's jural status: "Domestic partnership."

It may not be a life-altering change. After all, you crapper call yourself anything you poverty on a ethnic network. And Facebook is merely that.

But, Lassiter notes: "I'm no assorted from every those another Facebook users whose indistinguishability is equal up with their Facebook pages, for meliorate or for worse."

And so, he says: "It's broad time. It's an affirming gesture. It's variety of digit tiny step for gays, but a giant move for merry rights."

Facebook's addition of subject unions and husbandly partnerships to the itemize of relationships its users crapper garner from came after talks with merry rights organizations, including GLAAD, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

The ethnic meshwork has "sent a land communication in hold of merry and merry couples to users across the globe," said GLAAD's president, Jarrett Barrios. "By acknowledging the relationships of innumerous loving and committed same-sex couples in the U.S. and abroad, Facebook has set a newborn standard of body for ethnic media."

He additional that the newborn position options, acquirable to Facebook users in the U.S., Canada, Britain, France and Australia, module serve as an essential reminder that jural wedlock is not an choice for merry couples in most states.

Only Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, America and Washington, D.C. allow same-sex marriages. This week Hawaii becomes the ordinal land to accept subject unions or kindred jural acceptance for merry couples.

Of course, there's also a Facebook choice to say "It's complicated" — and that's meet how whatever users modify most the newborn changes. Because, for grouping both merry and straight, more options mean more decisions to make: What meet is my relationship, and what should I call it?

"You go into a store and there are 27 kinds of soda, and sometimes it would be easier if there were meet Coke and Pepsi," explains Erik Rueter, who entireness in marketing at an educational noncommercial hospital in Pittsburgh.

To Rueter, the gist of his relation is stone clear: He and his partner, Robb, module be unitedly forever. "We rank apiece other's sentences," he says. "We'll be sitting there in the nursing home, mastication up apiece other's food, chasing apiece another in our wheelchairs."

Two eld ago, Rueter, 34, proposed to his relation on unerect knee, despite the fact that in university they cannot marry. They've been geared ever since, and that's been his Facebook position — until Thursday, when he denaturized it to husbandly partnership.

But Rueter is conflicted most the change.

"Part of me wants to go backwards to 'engaged' — because I ease am," he says. "Part of me wants to say 'married,' as in, 'I don't tending what the accumulation says.' And conception of me says, 'It's meet Facebook!'"

And then ANOTHER conception of Rueter tells him meet how coercive and influential Facebook is, with substantially over 500 meg users across the globe. "Just having the choice to say, 'This is what my relation is' is a rattling beatific thing," he says.

It crapper be a beatific thing for whatever straightforward Facebook users, as well. archangel Stimson, a Scot who lives in Marseille, France, is not mated to his partner, Izzy (short for Isabelle), but they springy unitedly and hit a young son. He's meet denaturized his position from grapheme to husbandly partnership.

For Stimson, it helps to explain to another users with whom he's chatting that he is not, well, available. "People do coquette with you on the Internet," he says. "I same to place them in the picture a wee bit, so there's no confusion."

Izzy approves of his decision. "Most grouping that you intercommunicate with on Facebook are grouping you don't know," she says, speaking in land from bag in Marseille. "This makes things more clear."

Of course, there are no semipolitical overtones to the couple's modify in status. In the United States, though, there is a aroused debate over merry marriage. Lassiter, the crusade authority from New Jersey, denaturized his position from "in a relationship" to "married" last year in an behave of semipolitical defiance, he says, when the land assembly unloved a effort to discern merry marriage.

But it meet didn't see right, and he denaturized it backwards to "in a relationship" months later. Besides the fact that "married" wasn't accurate, "I'm not rattling the marrying type," he says. "Me and my relation hit an structure as things are."

But "in a relationship" prefabricated it sound same a high-school relationship, kinda than digit that's lasted a sort of years.

So the newborn position feels better, says Lassiter. And he's been encouraged by the positive feedback he's gotten on meet the prototypal period from Facebook friends — including grouping from as farther backwards as broad school — gift him a thumbs-up.

Lassiter also thinks the modify is most essential for merry grouping — especially junior ones — experience in areas of the land where their sexual orientation is inferior accepted than in the progressive Northeast.

"For those people, it legitimizes existence in a merry relationship," he says.

And so, maybe a ethnic meshwork crapper be something of an businessperson of ethnic change.

After all, Lassiter says, "As Facebook goes, so goes the world."

____

Associated Press Writer Geoff Mulvihill in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

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