The madness of the age — making human relations explicit — continues in the form of XFN’s relationship profiles. Here, as a sample, is the entire range of possible romantic categories:

Muse, crush, date, sweetheart. The whole of romantic or sexual feeling in not just four words but those four?

The odd thing about about efforts like this is not merely the lack of completeness. Attempting to get to completeness would be admitting defeat, since the goal is simplification. The odd thing is that even the few proposals there are are obviously wrong.

“Date” is not the word for someone you are dating, and everyone knows it except the authors of this list. You can be my date to the prom without it ever being an ongoing thing; meanwhile, someone you are dating is never referred to as your date, but as your boyfriend of girlfriend. Ditto ‘sweetheart’, where the assumption is definite on intimacy and lukewarm on committment, when usage would indicate the opposite balance. And so on.

The best part, though, is the rationale:

You really can’t make this stuff up. “We left a bunch of stuff out because when you try to model all the ways people really talk about attraction and intimacy and attachment, it just seems messy.” The thought that maybe the domain they are trying to model is messy seems never to have crossed their minds.

And:

Earth to XFN: Most romantic relations are temporary. Fiance is a more formal state of affairs than sweetheart. Despite the fact that it doesn’t fit with your model, it is treated as a real category by actual people. Throwing out real-world behavior because it doesn’t fit your model is supposed to make you question your model, no?

It’s as if the creation of a list is meant to seem complete, because lists are discrete, and domains to be modelled are also supposed to be discrete…