Modern rejection
Rejection seemed a much more direct process when I was in elementary school. You knew you were no longer in the good books by simple virtue of a missing birthday party invitation, or even a much more blatant “I don’t like you anymore.” Sure, these resulted in a frantic shower of tears at the time, but now, it kind of looks like the proverbial band-aid– at least it was ripped off in one fell swoop.
I remember five years ago, back in the days where MSN messenger was the communication method of choice. A friend told me of this website that would tell you who had deleted you from their MSN contact list. “You have to take a deep breath or two before clicking okay,” he informed me. “And it still stings.”
And, yes, it did.
Today, however, it seems that as 20-somethings, we have very few direct rejections (except, of course, the break-up, which is an entirely different story). Instead, we have unreturned phone calls, gradual decreases in communication.
The exception? The Facebook friend delete.
Every once in a while, I notice a slight shift in my friend number. And I wonder, was it just that someone deleted their profile deliberately, as some of my friends have been known to do in the midst of a conspiracy theory fit? Or is it just me?
Of course, you can never figure out who is missing right off the bat. You don’t go through your friend list, one by one, trying to determine who’s suddenly gone from their alphabetical ranks. It is only at a random moment that you realize who exactly it is– when you randomly decide to check in on their page, you do a search of your email contact list to find that their name suddenly pops up as someone you aren’t friends with, or when you notice that their name has switched from clickable blue to unapproachable black in someone else’s friends list.
Then it occurs that someone has decided that having what you thought were witty status updates displayed on their home page is too much of you for their liking.
Most of the time, these deletes elicit but a shrug from me. People are always going through the cleaning out their closets phase, and I’m not smug enough to think I am that important in the lives of everyone on my friend’s list. Like the guy I partied with maybe three times high school, who added me, said nothing to me for a year, then deleted me. I don’t think I ever expected anything more profound than this. Or my ex’s psychotic ex-girlfriend, who, when they were together, added me as a friend in order to make sure him and I weren’t having a secret Facebook affair, and later deleted me when they broke up. She scared me a little (enough to have her on my limited profile), so I wasn’t terribly disappointed that she no longer cared enough to keep tabs on me.
However, every once in a while, the discovery smarts a little more. A few days ago, I realized that an old high school friend had suddenly disappeared. She wasn’t just another name on the list- I’d written on her wall, dammit, and she’d written on mine!
Before reading too much into it, I told myself that perhaps she was just streamlining. After all, we hadn’t seen each other in a few years. Perhaps she was only keeping close friends. So I clicked on our mutual friends, and saw a number of other friends from high school remained.
Nope, it was just me.
The honest truth is that I’m not losing sleep over this. All the same, though, I can’t help but think about whether my next encounter with her will be awkward (and the 10 year reunion is this summer!), knowing that she took the time to specifically click that delete button next to my name.
May 26th, 2009 at 7:18 am
haha this is so true- after some tension between my boyfriends ex girlfriend and my boyfriend and me (she had um, issues letting go- which included rocking up to his work when we had been going out and living together for almost 2 years to get ‘life advice’)
he deleted her. she kept me on for about 2 more weeks ( we were supposedly, what can u say, freinemies?) i thought- he doesnt have her any more why should i? im gonne delete her. go onto facebook. search for her name.
oh look! she had deleted me that very day.
i guess our facebook deletion was meant to be - and i gotta say, ever since i cant see her profile i have thought about her a whole lot less which is nice
May 26th, 2009 at 7:59 am
It’s amazing the effect a ‘Facebook delete’ can have don’t you think?!
May 26th, 2009 at 8:29 am
I did the opposite of this recently and deleted alot of ‘friends’ from facebook, people that had no place in my life anymore because they never contacted me and i was sick of reading their updates as they never bothered to involve me.
What really hurts is none of them seem to have noticed!
May 26th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Facebook deletion is something I don’t really like to do, but it irritates me to have people on there who I hardly even know. I don’t think I’d delete someone who I knew, even if it was only briefly. Apart from those “met-you-at-a-party-once” friends, that seems a tad pointless.
May 26th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Im going to start deleting random people…
just so it makes them mad when they find out…
May 26th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
I definitely over-think these things far too much and if i DID notice i had one less friend online, I would probably be investigating immediately to work out who it was.
Yes. I’m THAT sad…
May 26th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
oh wow, for a moment I was starting to wonder if YOU were the girl I deleted from my friends because I couldn’t stand her status updates (we went to high school together, i had written on her wall a couple of time, I only deleted her, but kept all our mutual high school friends on my list) but then you said 10 year high school reunion this summer, and i’ve got a couple of summers left…so phew.
But yeah, I just couldn’t stand her updates and got so mad one day, i just deleted her. i still like her overall though and would be nice if i saw her…maybe this sheds some insight?
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November 3rd, 2010 at 7:23 pm
we always love to be given party invitations and when we organize our own party, we also love to send party invivtations .
December 2nd, 2010 at 5:54 pm
i printed some party invitations on my high resolution inkjet printer just to invite some friends ,-`