This is my new Facebook mantra. Thanks Dani Quinnzell for making this up for me!
Obviously, I’m having some online frustrations lately! While Facebook is a great tool for keeping in touch with people, it seems that many people don’t realize that it’s also a way to catch them in lies or to create hurt feelings. Case in point, I’d like to talk about Sally.
Now, Sally and I met because she reached out to me, saying she was new to the area and really wanted to put in the effort to make some friends here. We seemed to really hit it off, and she had kids that were around my kids ages, so it was a good fit.
However, what I’ve noticed is that Sally is never around. Every time she gets more than a few hours off from work, she leaves the state to visit friends and family. Alright, it’s her life, she can do as she pleases, but then I’m stuck scratching my head as to why she reached out to me in the first place, because now I’m continuously trying to put effort into a friendship that I’m not even sure exists.
I wouldn’t say I’m needy as a friend, but I do have certain expectations of people. For instance, if you say we’re going to meet up on Wednesday, or your coming to the movies with me on Friday, I expect you to either follow through, or cancel in a respectable way. What I don’t expect is to log onto Facebook and see that you’ve left town and are instead hanging out with other people during the time that we had plans set up. Or, I text you when you are supposed to be somewhere, and you have a really pathetic excuse for not coming, like “I’m too tired” or “I my kid has homework.” You could have cancelled LONG before I asked where you were at.
What makes me even angrier is that my kids love Sally’s kids, and I have made the mistake before of telling them we’ll be meeting up, then Sally doesn’t show up. Now my kids are upset and hurt because this person is breaking their plans with us. I don’t care for it.
But, I have still tolerated it, hoping the good person I originally met is just going through an awkward patch and we can still be good friends in the near future. However, I’m really at my breaking point now. I am always inviting Sally out or to join in activities with us, and she always says she’s so interested and to send her the information online. I do so, and Sally acts like she never sees the information. For example, I spent months inviting her to join our scouts, and she always said “yeah, yeah, I’m interested just send me the info!”
What happened? She never came, never acknowledged my information sent to her (at least 15 times), and then she comes up to me the last time we get together and says she’s joining another scout program that her friend recommends. Umm… okay, it’s your life and all, but you couldn’t have said this to me so I’m not wasting MY TIME sending you information over and over about our scouts? It felt like a slap in the face. And now to see her post about scouting online, it upsets me, because she really made me feel blown off in the matter, but now she’s so in love with scouting that it’s every post online.
So, after this, and a half dozen similar incidents like this, but involving other topics, I finally posted online that I’m wasting my time with certain friendships instead of putting my effort into better ones, so I’d be deleting people soon. Now, Sally had blown me off at least three times since we last met up a month ago, yet she was able to comment within minutes of me posting that saying she would care if I deleted her.
I’m kind of angry that she hasn’t had time in the last four weeks to follow through on what she says she is going to do with me, but she can jump right onto Facebook and act like it would be such a loss to not be my friend any longer. It’s perplexing, to say the least. But, considering I can’t look at her posts in my newsfeed without feeling upset, I think it’s time to let this friendship go and move on. I feel that she’s been a complete waste of my time, and that there’s no sincerity in our “friendship” because she can’t stand to stay in town to be anyone’s friend.
Trying to Mom 