I have under 100 friends on Facebook, and have for some time, but the interesting thing about having so few friends is that it’s very easy to tell when somebody has removed you, since your friend count will go down quite visibly. Recently, somebody removed me, but for the life of me, I don’t know who, and if I weren’t otherwise so curious, I’d be led to believe it surely must not matter at this point!
It’s a curious process, really. You see your friend count is down. The first people who come to mind are those you suspect are most likely to remove you, but when you search your friends list, it’s never them. Then you move to your closest friends (just to make sure…), then you move to other names that start sticking out to you, then you just start guessing names from various social groups whom you remember being connected to.
Of course, it ultimately doesn’t matter. People have any number of reasons for removing friends. I tend to remove people I’m no longer associated with and who were only ever acquaintances anyway. I find it odd when people stay in touch with all 1,000+ people they’ve come across in their life, but I also generally like to move on from my past, maintaining the more meaningful connections. Only very rarely have I removed somebody because they’re a jerk.
One friend removed me at the same time they removed almost everybody else, so although that hurt, it at least gave me the assurance I hadn’t specifically said something to offend them. Another friend removed me conspicuously after an opinionated post of mine that, in retrospect, would have been easy to take out of context. No big loss there. Another friend, despite our disagreements having been private for years, attacked me quite publicly saying some really nasty stuff, and then proceeded to never say a good word to me for years. Great. That time I made the choice to disconnect.
Many years ago, before deleting my old account permanently, I started removing friends, just to have two friends add me back! It actually made me feel really good that they wanted to stay in touch, but I had only removed them because I was gearing up to delete my account. You never really know exactly why somebody removed you, and it probably doesn’t do any good to speculate, either.
Some people talk about removing “toxic” friends, but I find it ironic that the assumption is always that other people are toxic, and not you. It’s a legitimate question: “Am I a toxic person?” I think we all have negative attributes, some of which may stray into the realm of being toxic, so you have to be open to correction. In general, though, I don’t like calling people toxic, as if I were perfect, but there’s mostly just people I care to be connected to, and people I don’t care. It’s not even anything necessarily against the other person. Life is short, and I’m honestly probably not going to stay in contact with that person I talked to at that one BBQ at X church I only attended for less than a year.
Social media is strange. All we humans really have to go off of are cultural behaviors, and social media doesn’t fit well into our mental image of the world. There’s a South Park episode in which Kyle’s dad gets really hurt and offended by Kyle not being friends with him on Facebook. “So we’re still friends, right?” Because it isn’t natural to formalize friendships into binary lists (on/off, friend/not-friend), it’s easy to send the wrong message to somebody by changing the bit to “off”. The leader of the online small group I was part of sent me a friend request before I even knew who he was, and I deleted the request because I thought it was spam! But even once I learned who he was, I decided that it was okay to keep some boundaries, and to keep Facebook connections to people I know a little better.
You can always mute people from turning up in your newsfeed, too. I have occasionally found this feature to be quite useful.