Friday, June 17, 2011

The Friendship Purge: A Lesson I Learned from Facebook

     I just finished unfriending some contacts on my Facebook page. Every so often I have seen friends of mine post about their friendship "purge" and unfriending individuals for different reasons.
     When I have seen such posts, my knee-jerk reaction has been "how mean!" But now that I have been out of the closet for almost two years, I realize that this Facebook practice actually has applicability in every day life.
     There are individuals who were good friends of mine when I was a noted professor at an evangelical Christian university, a pious and stalwart leader in my church and an upstanding husband and father.
     Some of these "friends" had the decency to rescind their friendship right when I came out. That's fine: they didn't like it or agree and didn't feel they could support me.
     However, several of these friends offered to keep our friendship, even though they didn't agree with me coming out as a gay man. I thought these friends to be real troopers, loving me even though they didn't agree with me.
     With a couple of exceptions. most of these have stopped contacting me, stopped returning my phone calls and have disappeared from my life. I had been grieving this until this morning, when I was reminded of the Facebook purge.
     Just like with Facebook, sometimes, we need to clean up our home page. There are friends we have for life and others that are transitory that we have for a limited time. Mentally, I allowed myself this morning to purge those former friends who no longer consider me worth the effort of maintaining a relationship.
     I find it is very seldom in life we ever have our interpersonal relationships put to the test. These men and women had declared themselves my friend at one point: what did they mean? For me, if I declare someone a friend I love them through the good, the bad and the ugly.
     Since my life is now "ugly" to some of my former friends, I have been rejected and ignored. However, I don't have to be depressed. I simply "unfriend" those who do not love me as a friend should, and over time, add new friends to my life's contact list.
     Thanks, Facebook. I needed the reminder.