// Quarter Life Monologues

This morning, I was welcomed to my virtual office (read: my Gmail Inbox) by 10 Multiply invitations waiting to be approved. As I accepted one invitation after the other, I couldn’t help but smile at the weird “relationships” that these people are tagging me.

• Jeffrey Zamora has invited you to be his sister. (When he’s my high school best friend. Sister?? No way. :P)
• Andrew Aleta has invited you to be his second cousin. (When he’s my college friend/orgmate.)
• Nikos Sanchez has invited you to be his distant relative. (When he’s my brother.)
• Gino Carteciano has invited you to be his online buddy. (When he’s my online stalker, not buddy. LOL. Peace baddie!)
• Josiah’s Catering has invited you to be his business partner. (Uhh, okay.)
• MyKid’s World has invited you to be her business partner. (Acceptable.)
• Noemi Dado has invited you to be her friend. (Finally. Something that actually matched! Then again, it’s the safest network connection other than “online buddy”.)
  
• Chel Quitoriano has invited you to be her sorority sister. (When she’s a Twitter friend, and the wife of a blogger friend.)

And well, 2 out of the 10 invites, I declined, so I won’t mention them anymore. Heehee.

Looking at my multiply connections, I realized that I currently have 4 sorority sisters, 3 life partners, 2 fiances, 1 fraternity brother, 1 mother, 1 boyfriend, 1 neighbor, 1 distant relative (in the form of my brother) and 1 ex-husband.

Multiply is funny that way. With their limited network relationship options, you have no choice but to tag your enemy your “Friend” (then again, why would you add your enemy to your network? hehe), or your friend’s friend your “Online Buddy”, or your roommate your “Neighbor”, or your friend’s mother your “Mother”.

On the other hand, some people are just too papansin (in a cute kind of way) or maybe too bored, that they’d opt to choose the weirdest of connections. Hence, your friend’s little brother becomes your “Ex-husband”. Or your other friend’s (also) little brother your “Boyfriend.” Then your brother becomes your “Distant Relative”. And your high school seatmate becomes your “Fraternity Brother”. And your college buddy becomes your “Life Partner”.

Life would have been easier if Multiply invents more specific connections. (Like, “Stalker” or “Boyfriend Wannabe” or “Friend’s Little Brother”). Or, why not leave an option where you can just type in the specific relationship yourself so you can say “Tita” instead of “Mother”, or “Blogger Friend” / “Twitter Follower” instead of “Online Buddy”. It’s much easier that way. :P

It’s just like the infamous Friendster Status. Why o why would they force us to choose between five options only (Single, In a Relationship, Domestic Partner, Married, It’s complicated) when there are gazillion statuses in the world! What about Exclusively Dating? or Waiting for Mr. Right? or Looking But Not Really? or Single But Not Available? or Engaged? Because of their limited options, the world is suddenly full of complicated relationships and dosmetic partnerships and people pretending to be in a relationship. Hehe. And look, “It’s Complicated” is already patented to Friendster. Tamo nga naman. They now own the phrase “It’s Complicated”??! :D

Oh well, going back to Multiply, there’s always “Friend” and “Online Buddy” anyway. I guess all relationships can boil to those two lest you can’t find anything specific. ;)

So.. you have a multiply account? Add me up. Let’s see what relationship you’ll tag of me. ;)