Reflections on Getting De-Friended on Facebook

When I was in college, I loved to d.j. dances and house parties. For a people-pleaser like me, it was like crack: you play a song and instantly you know if people love you. Completely neurotic and unhealthy. Ah, the glory days.

This week I got de-friended by someone on Facebook. Almost definitely not the first time, just the first time I noticed as I've been at the same number of friends for a while.

I have no idea who it was. Maybe it was someone who didn't like my take on Tiger. Or someone who got tired of all my shameless self-promotion. Most likely, it's a student who hung out with IV for a while, friended me after a freshmen retreat, then broke up with us along the way.

For a conflict-avoidant people-pleaser like me (healthier than in college, but still working through it), there's some ways that the ease and anonymity of adding friends on Facebook and being broken up with is nice. There's an understanding (at least in some circles) that Facebook is for a vast array of loose acquaintances.

If you get tired of seeing someone's face pop up in your News Feed, you hide them or de-friend them--and they never know about it.

But in the end I wonder if all this is healthy, at least fora conflict-avoidant, people-pleaser like me. The hardest part and the greatest gift of my four and a half years at Carolina has been dealing with a bunch more conflict and criticism than I would like or prefer. Put simply, I've had to grow up.

An anonymous de-friending on Facebook isn't the end of the world. But when my students ask one another out and break up in a Google-chat (which is how I would have rolled if it had been around during my college days), I can't help but wonder about the loss of inter-personal skills and the maturation that comes with having those necessarily hard interactions.

And then you've got all those annoying, think-they-know-it-all bloggers. Good grief, that's a whole different tirade for another day.

All technology has anticipated blessings and un-anticipated curses. I'm grateful for the ability to keep up with so many people who I would have lost track with throughout the years without social networking.

I just need to not allow it to unhealthily prop me up, as I would be tempted to do. Jesus still calls me to wade into conflict, have hard conversations, be okay with not everyone liking me all the time. He gives me a new name and invites that to be enough for me, no matter what else happens. I don't want to replace that great gift with the flimsy-ness of Facebook friends.

In the mean time, if anyone has a holiday party they need a d.j. for, let me know...as long as you're cool with the circa 1988-2005 musical window!