FaceBook: Home of Emotional Hoarders and Fake Friends

I originally signed up for Facebook about 7 years ago to keep in touch with a friend who moved away at her request. Her reason was simple. Since she was moving away from many friends and family here, there were many to keep in touch with and she was too busy to email and call everyone personally to keep in touch.

It made sense at the time. I enjoyed having her in my life and we had shared many good times together. I didn't want to lose her from my life so I cheerfully agreed to open a Facebook account and friend her.

At first, like a any new toy, Facebook seemed like fun. I added my family members and a few people I had been friends with for years that were already on Facebook. I personalized my page and added photos of my awesome pets and took many selfies trying to find one that was just perfect. I glowed in the warmth of satisfaction as the people I had friended "Liked" my posts and my pictures and even commented on them.

In return, I "Liked" their posts and made cheerful comments about whatever they had posted, even if it was a picture of some food that looked like roadkill. Being able to interact so quickly and with so many people with such minimal effort seemed ideal - at first.

As time went by, I noticed that I was not interacting with many of the people I had friended on Facebook EXCEPT on Facebook. I realized that I missed the phone calls and meeting for lunch and catching up. I pondered calling one of them and then realized we had nothing to talk about or catch up on. All we had to do was read each other's facebook pages. It felt hollow and unsatisfying. Lonely even.

I looked at the page of the friend that originally convinced me to join and saw that she had over 700 friends. I wondered how many of them she could call in the middle of the night to come give her a ride because her car broke down. Probably not many. I am not sure what has happened. It is as if we have changed the definition of what it means to be a friend. A real friend is someone you can always talk to and count on and vice versa. Facebook friends are like fake friends in a way.

One example is my boyfriend. We're both in our mid-40's and he had over 135 "Friends" of his Facebook page. Most of them were people he went to high school with and has not seen or talked to in over a decade. I asked him what the point was of having the details of people's lives that he doesn't really even know anymore popping up in his feed every day and he didn't know.

Even though the original intention may have been to simply keep in touch with people you don't see that often, what ends up happening is that the person slowly disappears from your actual life and is stored away in a virtual space where you can hang onto them without really having to care about that friendship too much.

I realized that I don't see many of my facebook friends because I am not truly friends with them anymore. People drift apart for many reasons and there comes a point when regardless of how much you once enjoyed having them as part of your life at one time, you have to choose to let them go when they are no longer a real part of your life. Otherwise, you are holding onto emotional baggage like a hoarder holds onto physical baggage.

Friending someone on Facebook doesn't make them your friend or mean they are still a relevant part of your life. As human beings we have a limited amount of time and energy to invest in relationships and it is downright painful to see what was once a true friendship reduced to a one-dimensional point and click interaction of a stupid website. That being said, if someone is important to you, take the time to invest in that relationship with in-person time and phone calls instead of simply clicking a button on a social medium.