Social media has changed our lives in ways we never imagined...

and it has me thinking on this day.

I have a friend who I've been friends with for a very long time.  Good friends.  Best friends.  But we've had some issues come up in our friendship lately and there has been tension.

My friend followed me on Twitter and made it pretty clear she expected me to follow her.  I didn't really want to, but not because I don't like her or anything.  She has a myriad of interests that I don't share and since she retweets a lot of tweets about those interests it meant reading a lot of tweets I had no desire to read.  Sometimes dozens all at once.

So I had planned to unfollow her although I hadn't found a way to broach the delicate topic.  Then we had a disagreement and she made a unilateral decision that we weren't going to get together for at least a month.  That day or the next (can't remember for sure which), she retweeted a whole bunch of stuff I didn't want to read because I have no interest in it.  So I finally bit the bullet and unfollowed her. 

She didn't unfollow me at first.  But now she has.  And I don't mind. 

But it looked like she'd also unfriended me on Facebook at first glance (she hadn't, it takes a long time for the full friends list to load to the screen).  But when it looked like she had, I wondered if she was raising the ante, to use a poker metaphor.

Unfollowing me on Twitter is no big deal.  I doubt much of what I tweeted was of interest to her anyway.  However, if she had unfriended me on FB, I'd have been offended for some reason and it dawned on me that it shouldn't really matter.  Our connection is in the real world.  If it ends up that we don't get past this bump in the relationship road in the real world, our being or not being FB friends isn't going to make one iota's difference. 

Mind you I don't want the friendship to end, but I've spend the past ten days pondering the issue and preparing mentally for that to happen.  Some friendships are meant to last forever and some aren't.  We grow as people and we move along different paths.  If our paths have diverged, that's just part of life.  My life would be poorer, and I imagine hers would be as well, but life is too short and too precious to spend time trying to change what cannot be changed.  I don't hold myself blameless in whatever has happened, but I do feel that the majority of the issues that have arisen are hers and not mine.  So I'm just waiting to see what happens and whatever that turns out to be is fine.

It's just time to recognize that the social media component of friendship is interesting and useful, but we can't let it truly define our friendships.  Not the ones that exist outside of cyberspace at any rate.