Why Can't We Be Friends

All my life I was raised to believe that defriending a person on Facebook was about the worst thing you could do to someone. Forget the good old days when a duel at High Noon was the way you got closure. Now, according to The New York Times, passive-aggressively (passively-aggressively?) removing someone from your friends list is the kiss of death.

I must admit that the day when I opened Facebook and saw that my friend count had gone down was among -- if not the -- most devastating of my life. What did I do? I agonized. Who did I do it to? I aged decades with worry. I spent hours staring at the bathroom mirror, confused and puzzled and hurt and scared, wondering who I wronged and how.

Now, the scars are bursting open again. Oh God. I can't go on.

False.

There is nothing wrong with a good defriending. Just like periodically eliminating people on your phone is a necessity in this day and age (although who the eff "Bartlebly" was still haunts me), so is trimming the Facebook.

It's nothing personal. It's just, I don't really care about some of these people. And I'd be incredibly surprised to find out that they care about me. The fact that some rando from high school updates his status every fifteen minutes really makes me want to not see them again. And there's nothing good about status posts like:

"[Name Witheld For Obvious Reasons] is THE RASH IS FINALLY GONE! OH THANK GOD!!!111!1!!"

And I'll admit it. Last summer, I woke up one Sunday morning afternoon to see that I had been friended by four or five high school seniors out in Lexington. It's fun -- and possibly legally necessary -- to speculate about just what the bleep happened that led to this. But today, I wouldn't know them if they sat across from me in a cafe. And it makes me feel damned old to read their status updates about finally settling on a senior prom theme.

Besides, does anyone even use Facebook anymore? Beyond scrabble, or scrobble, or scrabbapple, or whatever it's called. At this point, I think Facebook is good for very few things: learning who is engaged, getting invited to birthday parties, and checking to see who else has a birthday on the same day you do so you can preempt their event. OK, and pimping this blog. That's about it.

So I'm sorry, but I'm going to start trimming the hedges, as it were. If you get defriended, it's nothing personal.

...

OK. It is the very definition of personal. But I'll be brutally honest. I don't care and I don't think you will either. In fact, we both probably don't remember each other. And if you do, friend me again, and I'll apologize and we'll get a beer and the first round will be on me. How's that?

Watch me be mass defriended now.

And no. Two years later, I still have not accepted my mom's friend request.

I'm a bad person.