I’ve been pondering “cleaning up” my friends list on Facebook for a few months now. Over the years I’ve been pretty haphazard about my criteria for adding someone as a friend, and while I don’t expect that to change I think its time to prune the list (that’s the OCD kicking in).
My primary rationale on adding friends to Facebook have been because either:
- you’re a friend from my youth I wanted to reconnect with
- you’re a current friend I’d invite over for dinner (even if we don’t live in the same town/state/country)
- you’re a new acquaintance I’m interested in getting to know better (or vice versa)
In the spring of 2009, in a very passive-aggressive action against my family, I accepted friend requests from virtually any high school friend for the sole purposes of letting them find out I was gay and passing that around the little town I grew up in. Childish and undoubtedly ineffective, but there you have it. I also accepted friend requests from Benjamin’s extended family to stay plugged into their lives, and I think it’s time to start trimming those ties as part of some closure.
I’ve never been a collector of people — I’d much rather develop a smaller group of close friends than a wide net of acquaintances. So sometime over the next few days and weeks I’ll be quietly “unfriending” people on Facebook that don’t fall into one of the categories listed above. And while I shouldn’t have to say this, I will anyway: if you’re one of the affected people, this is not an attack on you. If you feel that strongly about wanting my boring status updates to appear on your wall, friend me again. And anyone is welcome to follow my still-boring but longer blog posts.
Digital Ramblings 
Realized this afternoon that I had clearly missed some of your excellent blog posts. Boo! The solution: Go back and catch up on LJ. So here I am. :)
Interesting about your comment about friending people you knew from your youth. For what it’s worth, I think the MAIN way acceptance of gays advances is by people realizing, “Oh, this person I always thought was cool? He’s this thing I disapprove of. Waitaminute, that might mean…. .”
Whatever your original motives, I’m not sure the action itself was wrong. And one of the things I’ve realized from friending my small-town HS friends was that some of them, too, have turned out much different than I might have originally expected.
That said, I’ve considered defriending some of said HS friends as well, because they are the worst offenders of farmville!
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And apparently, LJ doesn’t like things in angle brackets. Looks like HTML, I guess.
Quote above is supposed to read “Waitaminute, that might mean … [ lightbulb ]”
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