Friended, unfriended, refriended, don’t want to be friended, ahh, Facebook

I do a bit of unfriending and to my knowledge I’ve only been unhappy about being unfriended one time. To the best of my knowledge, they don’t know when you unfriend them unless they look for your picture and it’s not there. The one time I was unfriended, I didn’t realize until I noticed her picture was missing from my friends list. In order to re-friend, she had to initiate the friending process again. So, you can sort of discretely unfriend but can’t discretely re-friend.

Old friends appear and send friend requests on FB. So, this can be great and it can be frustrating. I wonder if there are any social mores for this. Like, how well should you know somebody before you ask them to friend you? I like to have a personality for my Facebook which is that my friends on Facebook are the people that I want to keep updated with on a very regular basis. So when I get friend requests from people I haven’t seen in 20 years and didn’t miss – like very casual acquaintances from high school – I really don’t want to friend them on Facebook. Then, I feel badly because I don’t want to deny their request or not accept their request because it feels rude. So, how weird is this that after not seeing someone for 23 years, they send me a random message saying, hey why don’t we share pictures of our kids and stuff like that on a very regular basis? Well, no, I really don’t want to. So, then since I haven’t seen them for 23 years and they live in another state, is it really rude not to accept their friend request?

Then, there are those women who were catty in high school or college or the sorority and all of the sudden you get a Facebook invitation from them. So I think, they probably just want to show me how time has not aged them one bit and they look better than ever. So curiousity kills this cat and I go to their page and see what they look like. So, then I realize that my first assumption is not true. They have aged as gracefully or as not gracefully as I. Then I think they don’t have any sincere interest in friending me because we had only the desire to aquantance in high school or college so why would we friend now? So, I took the plunge and I just deleted these couple friend requests. But one person sent another. So, I accepted begrudgingly. Honestly, I wasn’t even an acquaintance of his. I knew his sister but not well enough to have even spent time with her. So, I accept it thinking I can unfriend him in a couple days and he probably won’t know. But why would I be a two-faced friender? Why don’t I just sincerely not friend him at this time?

Friending as a verb – how weird.