To Friend or Not to Friend; That Is The Facebook Question

I admit it: I’m a Facebook junkie. I’m on Facebook most days, if not every day. I’m not one of those people who posts every 15 minutes or anything, it’s just nice mindless entertainment when I need a five minute break from work. Having my morning tea? Time to see who posted fun pictures of their weekend. That sort of thing.

Early on in my Facebook usage, I grappled with the main issue: To friend people from high school or not to?

Like many people, I did not much enjoy high school. And like many people, I gladly left most of those high school people behind. There were my best friends then – still some of my best friends today – but the rest, some friends, but many not, I was more than happy to leave to the sands of time.

That said, it doesn’t mean I’m not as curious as the next person as to what happened to those people with whom I’d fallen out of touch. Especially if my curiosity will be paid off by finding out that the football jock I hated has become fat/bald/insert embarrassing thing here.

Now, as you surely know, unlike Myspace (at least the profiles people don’t jack up the security on) the main trouble with Facebook is that you can’t find out if those disliked relics of the past have become fat/bald/whatever unless you friend them, i.e., admit that you, in whatever sense of the word, want to be their friend. Sure, you can bop around on a friend’s account from time to time and see what you can see, but it’s just not the same.

I thought about it, and decided I would suck it up. I can say to Person Who Never Acknowledged Me But Probably Didn’t Dislike Me As Much As I Imagined that ‘Yes, I do want to be your friend,’ whatever that means. I told myself this was because I was older, wiser, kinder, and more comfortable with myself, but let’s be honest: I just wanted to see if they’d had 14 ugly kids and then not lost the weight – fingers crossed!

Unfortunately, this approach is not without its pitfalls. Sure, I have been rewarded with the delightful discovery that indeed several people look terrible and the concurrent realization that I am aging quite well (Thank God!). But the way Facebook works, you don’t just get the satisfaction of sating your curiosity and then forgetting about them again. They keep updating their damn profiles. And as much as I am happy for them to see my daily updates of how magnificent I’m doing, I don’t want theirs.

And I know, I know. There is some fancy way to rig it so that you only get the news feeds from the people you like. But what if I miss something juicy? Curiosity, cat, well, we know how I’m going to wind up.