FACEBOOK DE-FRIEND: THE NEW PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE

Colder than an icy drink thrown in your face, without a word your “friend” de-friends you on Facebook.

My first de-friend came from a guy I was dating. Since then, we have friended, de-friended back and forth a myriad of times. Yes, we are no longer “friends”.

Then there was one of my best girlfriends from back in the day. She urged me to join Facebook, and I did. Two days later, I was friended by the guy I ended up dating, and de-friending, and friending again. But a year and a half later, my girlfriend who had urged me to join Facebook became angry with me. We were interacting on another marvel of modern communication technology – texting. She was getting hysterical about a situation. I urged her to calm down, in ALL CAPS. Now, all caps can seem like screaming, but my intention was to call attention to my message, to break through the steady stream of panicked texts she was firing my way. I fired off the ALL CAPS – “CALM DOWN”. The texts suddenly stopped. I tried to call her that afternoon, and the next day, but she wouldn’t pick up.

Finally, I decided to check her Facebook page, to see if her panic had made the journey from text messages to a status update, but when I clicked on her page – the page was blank. She had changed her privacy settings so that I couldn’t see anything on her page. All that was left was her grinning face, with her crocheted chapeau – the one an old boyfriend of hers had seen her wearing on Facebook and advised her looked like a flower pot atop her head. But I let it go, thought I’d let a couple of days go by and see if she’d let me back into her world of updates, which usually revolved around daily newsflashes about how many cigarettes and glasses of white wine she’d consumed that afternoon. A week later, I scroll through my friends, and she was nowhere to be found. My friend had de-friended me as a further ramped-up passive aggressive slap in the face. Still, I ignored it, I had tried to call her several times to discuss my all caps offense prior to her de-friending me, I wasn’t going to inquire why she’d de-friended me. I thought, this too shall pass.

Another month goes by, I check to see if she is still donning the flower pot crocheted cap, but my search for her on Facebook yields nothing. I check the pages of our common “friends”, zip. Suddenly I realized, she used the ultimate passive aggressive Facebook fete accompli – she’d blocked me from Facebook completely. I attempted to email her and as I suspected, she’d blocked me from contacting her at her two addresses. I did a search on Google, she no longer existed on the internet, therefore, on the planet - as far as my eyes could see.

I much preferred the days of open confrontation. Disagree, have a fight, hash it out, slug it out, whatever. But Facebook is the new ultimate silent treatment, the new anti-social de-networking tool. I’d love to tell my friend to “suck it,” to “grow the f’ up,” but I have no way to reach her. Facebook de-friending trumps all, if you want to send someone a message, there’s no better way than to block them on Facebook. The trick is try to de-friend them before they de-friend you, or beat them to the punch metaphorically - the good newfangled Facebook way.