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I've been "unfollowing" FB friends who post stuff that I find offensive, or who mock me and belittle me if I do respond.
I don't deny their right to freedom of speech; I just don't want to see that crap in my stream.
Lately I've been privately messaging friends to let them know I'm unfollowing them. One guy actually apologized in public for mocking me, and I've restored him. Another guy just kept arguing his point in message after message until I muted him.
A friend in Holland, who had warmly welcomed me in the past when I visited his family, unfriended me apparently after I posted some election-time rant. My feelings were hurt, and it means if he comes to visit I suppose he won't want to call on us. What a ridiculous thing. I'll try to rise above it however and welcome them anyway.
On Facebook, it's probably better to stick to cute puppy pictures and talking about the weather. People are hyper sensitive and so easily hurt. First World problems.
Absolutely. Especially for my political & religious views. People are so close minded & refuse to accept others' opinions. I am better off with a select group of intellectual friends than a bunch of idiots.
You know what they say - its lonely at the top. When you learn & grow in life through education, travel & life experiences, your tendency to tolerate fools goes way down because everything becomes so transparent to you & its difficult to brainwash you easily. You are not afraid to express your opinions & expect people to respect them but the world doesn't function that way. People are close minded & too set in their ways. You have to struggle to find like-minded people like you. I question certain things in life which seem to offend people. I have lost few friends because of it. But I don't regret it at all. I have made some very good quality friends who are very successful & brilliant. I am not disrespectful or insulting to anyone's views but curious to learn why they are so loyal to a certain belief. For example, few months back one of my friend asked me if I was happy about the new immigration policies (I am an immigrant turned permanent citizen). I said not at all & she was very surprised. I told her I am a legal immigrant & followed all the steps to become permanent resident & its unfair that people who break the law are being given unfair advantage. She said well, they have kids so the govt is being kind to them. I asked her what about the illegal immigrants who have fertility issues & cannot have kids? Should they be discriminated for not having kids? By that logic all the criminals locked up in prison should be forgiven for breaking the law if they have kids. That made her MAD. The next day she posted some fuzzy article about supporting immigration but I didn't comment on it. We talk less after that as she took offense to my stand. Not starting an immigration debate here. Just an example of why you might get unfriended or ignored. Sometimes when you show the mirror, people don't like what they see & they would hate you for that.
I have cut a couple people out of my life completely, including my first wife and my oldest friend. They became too toxic to tolerate.
On FB the only people I have unfriended were random friend requests from people in other countries who turned out to not be very interesting. Some people have unfriended me. Usually they are the sort of people who interpret anyone disagreeing with them as a personal attack.
I do have one cousin who is a cheerleader for Jesus. She posts nothing but religious tracts. I didn't unfriend her, but I blocked her posts so I don't have to see them.
I have a couple of friends that make some pretty offensive political statements. Generalizations that are untrue. It usually only happens around elections so I move on and don't comment. They are my friends, even though we are polar opposites on the political spectrum I don't unfriend them. I know how they are in person and though I feel they are misguided and not as smart at me (lol) I know their heart is in the right place. Now if they were to unfriend me for stating the same things then in my eyes I'm the better friend and I would lose respect for them. I respect them to have their opinions so why should I not deserve the same? But I don't post political things because I know how they turn out on facebook. I just think its funny that people who rant and rave whether its pro Bush or pro Obama get all mad and offended when people comment. What do they expect?
I have been unfriended. One crazy relative of my husbands. But all of us on my husbands side of the family with his last name got unfriended. We still laugh about the facebook war that started the unfriending frenzy. That woman was certifiable crazy. I was also unfriended by a couple other people. One woman whose daughter was a preschool classmate of my daughter unfriended me because I could not car pool her daughter to school when they started kindergarten. My daughter and her best friend who lived near us were going to the same charter school. That mom and I set up our car pool arrangement. The other mom found out that our girls were not going to the public school so she switched her daughter to the charter school to be near our daughters then called me and said how should we arrange the car pool. She didn't even ask. I said I'm sorry but I can't fit an extra kid in my car. I had a truck that fit 3 car seats (age (my son) 3, 5 and 5). She then wanted her 5 year old to ride in the front seat of my truck. I told her I was not going to break the law. She got mad and unfriended me, lol. She later unfriended her best friend and now her ex best friend and I are really good facebook friends. She was not a nice person so no loss. Last summer me and another friend got unfriended by someone we never met but we had mutual friends and we were going to meet her at a large get together, out of the blue two of us got unfriended and we have no idea why to this day. It wasn't anything we posted but we suspect another woman used our names as an excuse for something and so she unfriended us based on a lie. The other woman had used another friends name for some other drama and turned out to be a lie. No big deal, we ignored her at the function and she did not have as much fun as us! Her fault.
I have a friend with the same position as you. I warned him Obama bashing with me can't happen again. You were probably either warned or were given hints to stop yet you didn't. I find it "odd" your were surprised the friendship was terminated. I do not blame her and see her side completely.
Why? Unless Obama is family to you, or your 'friend' was a raving racist, why would you let that end a long-term friendship?
I was "unfriended" in real life and never found out why.
My best friend in college and I spent a lot of time together, were in each other's wedding parties and visited each other several times when we lived in different states. This went on for about fifteen years. Then she called and said that she, and her preschool daughter, wanted to visit for a specific week one summer. She called only two or three weeks in advance. Normally, it would not have been a problem but we were almost finished building a house & moving out of our old place right in the middle of her proposed visit.
I politely explained that we were moving and suggested that she visit another time. She basically hung up on me and never spoke to me again, ever. Never answered my phone calls or letters, never explained why she "cut me off", nothing.
The only thing that I could figure out was that there must of been some special reason why she had to visit me that week, but she never explained that to me.
Occasionally, I still wonder about it (such as when I look at photographs from my wedding). How can you be best friends for 15 years and suddenly not speak to the other person again, without even telling them why?
That sounds like such which has happened to me. Two very key friends in college, people I did EVERYTHING with, they got to where they couldn't even keep in touch, say, with an email 1-2 times a year. I totally understood that we wouldn't be talking daily anymore, and that when you marry etc they become your priority, but I also believe hard-core close friends, which those 2 were, should last for LIFE. Friendships have to be cultivated.
They weren't interested in maintaining it, and never explained why. It hurt, and I still think they were wrong, but you have to move on.
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Quality vs Quantity
