The Facebook Breakup, Part 1

Everyone has been asking why exactly it is that Sara is a Facebook hater. We've decided to share her story with you here. Slowly. Which means we'll be releasing it in installments, as a serial, like the people who kill other people in a series.

The Facebook Breakup, Part 1

On the 225th day of our relationship, I broke up with Facebook. It was something I’d been thinking of doing for a few weeks, encouraged by a Home page that was increasingly less about me and more about people I did not know, confused by relationship definitions, but it took a reunion with a Friend for me to finally let go.

Theoretically, Facebook and I should have stayed together for years. Whenever some lost person from my past found me, or I them, there were a few moments, sometimes days, of excitement. We’d Message until our whereabouts and whatabouts had been determined. We’d inquire of other lost people, sometimes there were answers, sometimes not. Usually we’d become Friends somewhere in the process. And then we’d reach the WhatNow stage, the place you land when you realize you never should have hit that “Add as Friend” link. Because if someone was actually your Friend and not an interesting memory trigger, there would be no question of WhatNow.

Part of me wonders if this phenomenon is specific to the significantly post-college crowd, those of us who are old enough to know people we once cared about that we have not seen nor heard from in more than ten or twenty years. Another part of me thinks everyone has a WhatNow Friend conversation rotting in their Inbox. And that’s fine, or was fine until Facebook decided to make everyone’s business so public. Now whenever any Friend does anything you know about it. That’s annoying. And the only thing more annoying than knowing that a WhatNow Friend is packing for a trip is knowing when any of your Friends beFriend someone you’ve never heard of, or get tagged in a photo album of someone you don’t know, or comment on a photo, or do anything that is not directly related to you. The world does not need to be so small. It’s already small enough. That is why we have our own homes, and doors.

Of course that didn’t stop me from wanting to meet up with a WhatNow Friend. When she asked me, “Want to meet up sometime?”
I said, “I'd love to meet up.” And I meant it. We were two days into our Friendship, following fifteeen years apart. The WhatNow was getting an answer.

As she told me she’d told her husband, who I’d never met, “I knew her for one year in college.” During that year we were quite close. She was slow to make friends, a relationship trepidation likely linked to the fact that she was an orphan by age four (one accident, one murder; both horrible). But she was smart and fun and funny and I’m quick to make friends, a relationship impatience likely linked to the fact that as one of four I was always looking outward for attention (not to mention a newish confusing parent separation). Neither of us had ever felt properly taken care of; both of us found flaws in Catholicism, the religion into which we’d been raised. We lived together, took a class together, held hands through family and boyfriend pains, and generally watched each other’s backs. We got our first tattoos together, celebrating and commemorating our same-month birthdays in a garage-turned-studio. We were not the happiest girls on campus but we had each other, until I transferred the following year.

The Facebook Breakup, Part 2 to be released Monday.

Comments

[ST_ParkSlope]

lol, love it. Whatnow stage, in my experience, is followed by the OhWell phase (ambivalent that you see my post activity)