Confession: I un-friend people on Facebook.

I un-Friend people on Facebook. Having one thousand Facebook friends is not for me. I prefer to keep my friends list to family and people I am actually friends with… People I see and talk to from time to time. Some of my Facebook friends I don’t interact with outside of the internet but they have interesting posts and I enjoy connecting with them.

I like to stay under 200 friends. Right now I have 222, which is a record for me. Every couple months I go through and delete people who I'm not actually friends with or I don't talk to on Facebook anymore. It’s liberating! The people I delete probably don't even notice I delete them because we don't even interact on Facebook. I prefer to keep my Facebook to people I actually interact with. Everyone has their standard, and that's mine.

Only twice have I un-friended someone for an actual reason. The one person I un-friended because he would post pictures of dead/bloody deer he shot while hunting. (I don’t want to see that in my news feed!) The other person was someone who directed me in a musical and he ended up being PSYCHO so I just cut all ties with him. It was for my mental health.

So, getting to the purpose of this post… I was actually confronted by someone I un-friended on Facebook.  I’m sure you want the juicy story of the confrontation. Don’t worry. I’m going to give it to you!

A couple weeks ago, the cast of a musical I was in got together for a little “reunion” of sorts. I was in this musical 3 years ago, so I hadn’t seen some of my former cast mates in several years!

A few hours into the party, I noticed a cast member, who I had not seen in a while, had just arrived. This was a woman who was never that friendly to me, and we were never hung out besides the time we did the show. We didn't have a lot in common and we lived 45 minutes away from each other.  It wasn't that I disliked her.- we were never going to be friends and that was okay.

When I saw my former cast mate, I went right over to say hello. "Hey!" I greeted her with a big smile. "How are you? I didn't even recognize you!"

"Maybe that's because you un-friended me on Facebook so you haven't seen any pictures of me lately," she snapped at me, in front of at least four other people.

Wow, that stung... to say the least.

I recovered quickly. "Hmmm, possibly?” I said as if I was puzzled. “So how are you?" I asked, without skipping a beat.

"I'm great!" she said with a huge, phony smile. Then she turned away from me.

Damn. I never knew un-friending someone who I wasn't even friends with was ever going to bite me in the ass, but it just did.

What she said really hurt me. First of all, I think I'm a little sensitive. Also, I am not used to people that rude. So when people are rude to me, my feelings get really hurt. The thing is, I am not friends (in real life or on Facebook) with people that would ever talk to me like that or treat me that way. And since I would never talk to someone the way she talked to me, I got really taken aback by it.

I left the party soon after that. The next day I received a Facebook message from my former cast mate with a non-apology. It was one of those, “I’m sorry that you got so upset” apologies. She also mentioned that I clearly didn’t “get her sense of humor”.  Seriously, there is nothing LESS remorseful than an “apology” that puts all the blame on the person you are apologizing to.

Her message did not deserve a response, so I did not respond to it.

I guess I was on the right track when I un-friended her in the first place!

So my dear readers… Do you un-friend people on Facebook? (If you do, be careful or you will have a story like mine!) Am I required to friend everyone who sends me a request and just keep collecting Facebook friends forever and ever, lest I be confronted by people from my past at parties???