The "Defriending" Plague

A most disturbing phenomenon I've witnessed these last several months is the quickness which people take to "defriending" people on sites like Facebook. It may be a small gesture, but it still symbolically indicates that a person is not only not willing to associate on Facebook, but is also repudiating a particular person in whole. When people block one another in order to avoid seeing them at all and close off communication, the rejection is even deeper. I recognize valid reasons for wanting to do this and have engaged in it myself, but after witnessing a few people I've valued do this to me, even if I only knew them online, I have become disappointed and disturbed.

People can add a very unique and rich value to life, one that is very complex given that people themselves are very complex. For happiness, it is much a benefit to have valuable people in your life and to nurture worthwhile relationships while avoiding and terminating bad ones. A very bad thing to do is to be too at ease with terminating relationships, for you could easily give up a deep value you might never be able to get back. One on hand you could do something that makes a relationship irreparable, and on another you could lose a person's willingness to acknowledge you and be an audience for your character, thereby preventing valuable relations that could happen or be repaired.

Given what's at stake, isn't it proper to address conflicts before resorting to terminating contact? Somehow or another, people I used to interact with on occasion, even if seldom, have taken to repudiating me in whole without notice or addressing issues. Maybe a certain political view I have or such has offended them, but I had no way of knowing since rejection was their first resort. Some people I used to deal with in person and others had writings I enjoyed, but now we're apparently on bad terms and separate, for whatever reason I do not know. It's possible there's an element of regret in their decision, as they might possibly still view my writings and networking profile as evident by their being on my generated list of friend suggestions. (Computer programming can't be anti-causal; I suspect that when someone interacts with my profile it might trigger their own profile to be suggested to me, or to appear in a top selection of another person's friends list.)

I'm concerned about this issue precisely because I myself had to resort to cutting a large portion of people out of my life out of necessity, which has been disappointing and hurtful to this day. Especially of concern is that I cut my best friend off from my life due to my past emotionalistic ways of treating people, which I've never stopped regretting due to the deepness of the bond we had. As a result I've done thorough thinking on how I ought to conduct my relationships and try to be as patient as possible in my dealings, only resorting to terminating contact once I identify they're ultimately detrimental to my values and that no resolution is possible, or at least that it's not worth working matters out. As such, it's disappointing when I see other people take such careless conduct in their own dealings.

Think before you defriend, or otherwise: farewell forever.