Thursday, January 06, 2011

How Facebook impacts my life...and yours?

As you know, I'm a softball player and I'm fairly outgoing. Both seem like positive things, at least I think so, generally at least the latter is seen as good. Being a softball player might be a mixed bag! Recently however, I've started to encounter an.....issue. Not necessarily bad or good, but an issue nonetheless (I love typing that word by the way "nonetheless"...seems like it needs to be more than one word but it isn't). Even if you don't play softball, if you're involved in any social events, you probably run across this too....if you are also on Facebook.

See, the guys on my teams are usually 10-15 years younger than me and not all are married. Many are though, so that's fine. The others however have....what? Girlfriends. And the girlfriends come to the games. And they come to our tournaments when we go out of town. And Joe talks to them because he's an outgoing guy and likes to meet new people. Plus I like to take an interest in my teammates personal lives because it's more than just softball.

Then Facebook comes along and now I get friended by these softball teammates' girlfriends. Fine.

Until they breakup.

Right now I'm friends on FB with no fewer than three women who have dated guys on my team, oh wait, just remembered a fourth. Four. Now these folks are nice and all, but now what's my real connection with them? Is there a chance that I'll even see them again? I guess it's no greater or less than many of my FB friends to tell you the truth: people from high school or ex co-workers.

Without FaceBook, these people would have disappeared from my life.....so I guess FB is a good thing. It just impacted me in this odd way.

2 comments:

terri said...

I don't think anyone takes FaceBook so seriously that you have to worry about it. I just accepted a friend request from a guy who appears to have gone to my high school. I don't remember him at all and we haven't actually communicated, but he is friends with all of my other high school friends, so I accepted. (Now I hear my mother asking, "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you go too?")

alexis said...

generally if it's acquaintances, I just remove them. Basically I realized I had loads of acquaintances whom I couldn't even remember how/who I met them, so there didn't really seem to be a point to our keeping in touch such as it is on FB.