How to Edit Your Relationship Status on Facebook

Updating your relationship status on Facebook sounds straightforward — and it mostly is — but the process trips people up more often than you'd expect. Whether you just got engaged, recently went through a breakup, or simply want to remove the information entirely, Facebook gives you control over what appears on your profile. What varies is how that control works depending on your device, privacy settings, and what you're trying to communicate.

What Your Facebook Relationship Status Actually Does

Your relationship status lives in the "About" section of your Facebook profile. It's one of the optional personal details Facebook lets you display — or hide — from others. When you add or change a status, Facebook may generate a life event post that gets shared to your timeline and potentially your friends' feeds. This is the part that catches a lot of people off guard.

Understanding this before you make a change matters. Updating from "In a Relationship" to "Single" can trigger a public notification unless you adjust the audience settings during the edit process.

How to Edit Your Relationship Status on Desktop

1. Go to facebook.com and log into your account.
2. Click your profile name or photo to go to your personal profile.
3. Click "About" just below your cover photo.
4. In the left-hand column, select "Family and Relationships."
5. Scroll down to the Relationship section and click "Edit."
6. Use the dropdown to select your status — options include Single, In a Relationship, Engaged, Married, In a Civil Union, In a Domestic Partnership, In an Open Relationship, It's Complicated, Separated, Divorced, and Widowed.
7. You can optionally tag a partner by entering their name. They'll receive a request to confirm the relationship, and it won't appear publicly until they accept.
8. Before saving, set the audience (Public, Friends, Only Me, Custom) to control who sees this information.
9. Click Save.

How to Edit Your Relationship Status on Mobile 📱

The steps differ slightly between the Android and iOS Facebook apps, but the general path is the same:

1. Tap the menu icon (three horizontal lines or your profile picture shortcut).
2. Tap your name to open your profile.
3. Tap "Edit Profile" or scroll down to the About section.
4. Look for "Add hobbies, relationship, etc." or scroll to find the relationship section under life details.
5. Tap "Relationship" and select your status from the list.
6. Set your privacy preference for who can see this field.
7. Tap Save.

The mobile app interface updates periodically, so menu labels may appear slightly differently depending on which version of the app you're running. If you can't find it through Edit Profile, navigate directly to your About tab → Family and Relationships from your profile page.

Controlling Who Sees Your Relationship Status

This is where individual outcomes start to diverge significantly. Facebook gives you several audience options:

Setting your relationship status to "Only Me" effectively hides it from your profile without deleting it. This is a useful middle ground if you want to remove it from public view without making a visible change.

The Life Event Post — And How to Manage It

When you update your relationship status, Facebook defaults to creating a life event tied to that change. This post can appear in your friends' News Feeds, which is exactly what many people are trying to avoid — particularly during a breakup or a quiet engagement.

During the editing process, Facebook prompts you to set the audience for that specific post, separate from the standing privacy setting on your status field. You can:

• Set the post to Only Me so the change saves but nothing is shared
• Delete the generated post immediately after saving if it goes to your timeline
• Choose not to share it as a life event by adjusting the post's visibility before confirming

These two settings — the audience for the status field and the audience for the announcement post — are independent of each other. Mixing them up is the most common source of accidental oversharing. 🎯

When You're Linking a Partner's Profile

If you tag a partner, the relationship status won't appear publicly until they confirm it on their end. Both people see the relationship status on their profiles once confirmed, and both can remove it independently. If one person removes the linked status, Facebook may again generate a notification — so it's worth coordinating that if discretion matters.

Variables That Affect Your Experience

Not everyone gets the same result from the same steps. A few factors shape what you'll encounter:

• App version: Older versions of the Facebook app sometimes show different menu structures or lag behind interface updates.
• Account region and language settings: Menu labels can vary.
• Profile completeness: Accounts with fewer personal details filled in may display the relationship section differently.
• Partner's account privacy settings: If the person you're tagging has locked-down privacy settings, linking may not work as expected.
• Whether you've set a relationship status before: First-time additions and edits to an existing status follow slightly different prompts.

The actual mechanics of updating a relationship status are consistent across Facebook's platform — what varies is how visible that change becomes, how it interacts with your existing privacy setup, and how your partner's account settings factor in. Those pieces depend entirely on the configuration you're working with.