Let's talk, for a second, about Sex and the City. If you're not familiar with the show, all you really need to know about it is this: It featured a central character who was a sex columnist. Her name was Carrie. She had three good friends, who were named Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte. The show featured another recurring character, too, an on-again-off-again boyfriend who was the frequent subject of Carrie's columns. He did not have a name. He went, instead, by a pseudonym: "Mr. Big." This was meant to protect his privacy.

And that was, in turn, because even Carrie, the sex columnist—even Carrie, whose job was to analyze and publicize her relationships—recognized the sanctity of romantic intimacy. What happens between a couple, sex-wise and otherwise, should stay between a couple. The conversations, the fights, the daily doings of romance … these are private things. Confidence must be maintained, in every sense.

That approach is practical and, often, romantic. It can also be, however, hazardous. It means that relationships are opaque by default, and that participants in those relationships, consequently, can lack meaningful models for navigating them. Which means in turn that schlocky rom-coms (happy 10th birthday, Love Actually!) and pun-happy TV shows (hi again, Sex and the City!) keep, and hold, our attention not just because of what they are, but because of what they teach. They give us ambient insights into what other couples experience, how other pairings do things. They model romance for us in ways that tradition and cultural convention tend to preclude.

I mention all that because of Twitter—and, more specifically, because of Claire and Alan. Unlike Carrie and Big, Claire and Alan are real people. They live in Chicago. They met eight months ago. They've been living together since the end of September. They have been fighting for approximately the same amount of time. But they've also been doing something that has turned the conventional wisdom of coupledom—intimacy equals privacy—on its head: They've been publicizing their fights ... on Twitter. Their joint account, @WeFoughtAbout, offers a catalog of argument topics, which range from the petty ("Alan sent me an article that put Prince in a bad light") to the profound ("Claire tried to comfort me and I wouldn't let her") to the Potter ("Claire blamed me for Dumbledore's death.").