Apparently, 'Unfriend' is the New It Word for 2009.

Is it wrong of me to say that that makes me a little sad? The whole concept of "unfriending" (and yes, I understand that there are valid uses of it, like if someone turns out to be stalkery and weird) makes me sad. It reminds me too much of grade school days, where the girls I knew would "friend" and "unfriend" people with, it seemed to me, no good reason at all*. The whole concept of "unfriending" pushes the button corresponding to one of my deepest "issues" - I think because I DID have "friends" in my past who either pulled the "If you don't give me your new Barbie, I won't be your friend any more" scam**, or who just decided that I was a drag on their newfound popularity. So they unfriended me. And 25 to 30 years later, it STILL hurts to contemplate it.

So I don't like "unfriend," and I don't like the thought of it being used lightly. Or maybe I just need to get used to this brave new world, where relationships mean little - where "hook up" has replaced "courtship" and where BFFs are really only BFFs until the following months.

I've said before I don't have a lot of friends, but the ones I do have, I am pretty fiercely loyal to. They have to do A LOT - I mean A LOT - to make me angry enough to consider dropping them. (I am actually probably too forgiving sometimes for my own good). So I find the whole idea of making and then dropping friends (I mean intentionally, not the sort of "we live on opposite coasts and never see each other and are at different points in our life's journey so we don't have so much in common any more" type of growing-apart) sort of appalling. And it makes me feel insecure: how can I trust this person if they might decide to stop being my friend next week for some capricious reason?

So, though "unfriending" may be the wave of the future, and I realize it's what I interpret as a serious word being used for a casual situation, it still bugs me.

(*I really, seriously wonder some days if, as a child, I might have been a bit farther towards the Asperger's end of the neurological spectrum, remembering how baffling and opaque so much of socialization and the "rules" (particularly those levied by other girls) seemed to me. It just seemed so much of what they did and how they chose friends seemed very capricious and illogical.)

(**How I got through high school without some guy pulling the bad old, "If you really loved me, you would..." scam on me makes me wonder now. Perhaps there were a few things I was capable of holding the line on.)