How and why it came about, we may never know. I suspect that the popularity of Bridget Jones' Diary (and later, Gone Girl), with its wryly written journal entries, has something to do with it. I wonder, too, whether the original third-person format of Facebook status updates – "Katy is [insert what you're up to here]" – established a distance between our real and online selves that we have since struggled to close. Our reluctance to use the possessive – "my boyfriend", "my partner" – could certainly be indicative of a tendency to think of ourselves in the third person. Or perhaps it is pure narcissism: a carefully positioned "this one" conveys to the people who matter that you have hit the relationship jackpot but in refusing to name your significant other, you ensure that the focus remains squarely on you.