The Awkwardness of Facebook

When I first joined up with Facebook two years ago, I went crazy adding people as friends. There were people I added that I barely knew their names, but I added them because I must have sat next to them in high school English or worked a shift with them at one of my first jobs. After I had accumulate some 250 friends, I thought, "This is stupid...why do I want all these people as my 'friends' when I never even had a real one-on-one conversation with them in my life?". And so I purged the friend list.

I deleted friends based on whether I had zero communication with them (never commenting on status', pics etc or sending messages). If I didn't care to see their pics or know what they were doing, why should I reveal my info to them? I deleted some 150 friends. And that kind of thing makes it slightly awkward when you bump into one of those deleted friends like I did today.

While I was in Walmart this morning, I saw a girl I used to play ringette with, but we were never "solo friends" (meaning we never did anything just her and I or chatted on the phone). We chatted for a few minutes and the whole time we were talking, I just felt like the friend deletion was a white elephant in the room. I wasn't sure what I was going to say if she asked why I deleted her...what could I say? Because I'm just not that interested in your life? Awk-ward (to be said in a sing-song voice).

I recently accepted a friendship from a girl I went to junior high with and, after looking through her friends list, realized I didn't want any of her friends being able to access my profile or pictures through her (because I'm pretty sure some of them had been or will possibly end up in my classroom) and so I immediately dumped her. She sent another friend request and I denied it. She sent another with a note asking what was going on and that she thought I had accepted the request. I just continued to ignore the requests and hoped she got the message. I am just not looking forward to bumping into her again and having to explain she was dumped because of who she associates with because that will make me look like a total snob. Whatever. It's just Facebook. Get over it.

On the flip side, when I've been dumped by people, it makes me wonder if I did something wrong. It makes me question whether I should have commented more on their pictures or "liked" their statuses more often. It's funny how being dumped on Facebook can really make you question your ability to be a good friend when, in reality, it isn't anything like a real friendship (because how often do you go around constantly poking your live friends?) :-)