When Their Name Doesn't Light Up Anymore

What do you do when you type someone’s name on Facebook, and it doesn’t light up anymore?

You know what I mean. Well, OK, so it never exactly lit up in the first place, but it used to highlight itself…to show that you were friends. What do you do when you type in someone’s name, to tag them in a post or photo, and it doesn’t highlight itself anymore?

You know what it means, and yet maybe it doesn’t. Many’s the time that my wife’s name wouldn’t light up on my laptop, but would on my iPad. But really, except for situations like that, when there’s a system glitch that you’ve run into before, you pretty much know what that means.

You’ve been unfriended.

So you go to check your friend list to see if they’re still there…and find that they’re not. And…just to be sure…you check their friend list (if you even can anymore) to see if you’re still on it…and you find that you’re not.

So what do you do now? What do you do when you’re absolutely certain that you’ve been unfriended?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

You don’t say a word. You don’t contact that person and ask what’s up. You also don’t mention it to mutual friends, who might inadvertently mention it to the person who dropped you. After all, the point here is to pretend that you didn’t even notice that you’d been unfriended. Letting them know that you know would just make things awkward.

Well…wait…aren’t they already awkward?

But what else do you do? You think about the “friendship”, such as it was, and ask yourself what happened. Did you do something specifically to piss this person off, or did the ravages of time simply make you insignificant? And be honest when asking the second part of that question…did the ravages of time perhaps also make that person insignificant to you, so that it’s no great loss?

And yet…you think of how this might have been handled differently. How it might have been handled more gracefully. How it might have been handled without your even knowing anything had been…handled.

Really. If you were often posting things that annoyed or upset your former friend, all they really had to do was unfollow you. I’ve done that to a number of people…especially during the 2016 presidential election season. That would allow you to still be friends, without them having to see any of your posts that you didn’t specifically mention them in.

And their name would still light up.

If they didn’t want you to see any posts they were making, they could’ve put you into a special category called acquaintances, which doesn’t get to see everything the regular friends do. I’ve got a couple of people in that category…people I felt sort of obligated to accept as friends, but who I really didn’t want to interact that much with.

And their name would still light up.

Both of those things would be very subtle ways of removing you from their lives…without you knowing that you’d been quite specifically…well…dumped.

And feeling hurt by it.

So you just go on as if nothing ever happened. Because eventually, after the initial shock, you’ll get over it, and won’t care anymore. And maybe you’ll even decide that this person did you a favor.

But now all this has got me thinking…I need to go unfollow a few people!