So on Wednesday I did something that was long overdue - a facebook cull. Browsing through my "friends" I notice people that I don't speak to any more, or think that I will ever speak to again. I also see people that I never even liked who's friend requests I excepted out of curiosity to see what kind of life they were living now. My delete button was hit more often than not leaving me with less than half of the friends that I had to start with. In one easy and effective click I had removed these people from my life.
So why can it not be this easy to remove people who are around in your everyday life? It is nearly impossible to cut some people out as they hang tenaciously on by their finger tips desperate to be involved with you in some way. I don't understand some people who claim to still be best friends with all of the exact same people they were friends with when they were 10 when the only thing that they now have in common is that they were friends when they were 10! At some point you need to trim back on the dead weight and allow room for new friendships which would possibly be more fulfilling. (In writing this I have noticed that I am unable to type the word "friend" correctly - thank god for spell check!).
Maybe there should be some sort of protocol for removing people from your life other than ignoring them until they give up and go away. If only we could just text the person in question the simple message of "deleted" and from that point onwards they would no that you never wanted to hear from them again. But unfortunately in this society I have heard that people have this things called "feelings" which are apparently quite easy to hurt so this idea would no doubt end in a world full of people either madly raging or crying and rocking in a corner.
So for now we shall bide our time but if you ever receive a text from me (or from anyone else) that just says "deleted" - you will know that our anti-feelings (mini)revolution to remove our dead weight friendships has begun!
I agree with you on this. Although personal I blame some of it on social networks. The fact that everyone you 'know' online gets labeled as "Friend" is one of the worst mis-uses of the english langue I know.
ReplyDelete(enjoy the spelling and grammer errors I make in a comment about the english language btw)
Friendship is notsolid, but fluid and people move through our personal levels of friendship based on too many factors to list.
Personally I would group my friends into Best Friends, Trusted Friends, and Friendly Acquaintances. My Friendly Acquaintances list is vast and includes anyone I'm personally know (or am getting to know) that hasn't given me reason to dislike them. I would use the term 'friends' loosely for them still.. but the people I view as my real friends are the other two. They're the people I would call if I felt like crap, or that I trust to know anything about me. They're also the people I would do everything I could to help and be there for if needed.
PS: Thank you for being a friend I can trust. :)