FRIENDS AND UNFRIENDLY

A couple of years ago I was in the process of garnering signatures for a petition on something that was, most definitely not a pressing social issue. I was advised to join Facebook in order to increase the total number of signers. I did join Facebook, had no idea what I was doing - in innumerable ways as it turns out - and added minimally to the petition's signatures. Still, that put me on Facebook. Periodically I get e-mails from that site notifying me that someone wants to be my friend. When I know the person by name or association, I approve the request, leave Facebook and visit it again the next time those requests pile up and get insistent enough to warrant my attention.

I really didn't have much of an opinion about Facebook for a very long time. I truly despise the usage of "friend" as a verb. There seems to me something rude, drooling and imbecilic about "Friend me," as opposed to "May we be friends?" That's probably a function of my age and respect for language. Yes, I understand that languages are living, mutable things but that doesn't mean that they have to grow niggling and stupid like the sleaze from the Cato Institute I recently heard insist that because he is a "Libertarian" he will use any word he pleases, regardless of the ignorance it betrays in him, until it shows up in the dictionary.

Last autumn I got a message from an old and very dear friend. The message was one of the nastier and angrier I've ever received. She and I have been friends since the spring of 1967 when a mutual friend introduced us. We dated for a bit in college but have remained in touch more or less regularly ever since. We've spent hours on the phone during various crises in each of our lives consoling one another or simply allowing each other to vent. In short, she is a friend, an actual, real world friend and has been for some 44 years.

Earlier in 2010 she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer. She is undergoing some aggressive and, from what I gather, debilitating treatment that, like much cancer therapy, runs a three-way race to kill the cancer before the cancer or the treatment itself kills her. My friend tends to focus outward rather than in. She is angry - as she has a perfect right to be - at her predicament as well as frustrated by the lack of control that she has over the disease and her body. She can't take out that anger on the cancer itself. It just doesn't listen. If the cancer could listen to her it would have left her body within minutes of its discovery. She can't be angry with her doctors because that's simply counter-productive in the extreme. Still the pressure of that anger and frustration is building up like unvented steam in a boiler. She must fall back on her friends when she needs to vent the venom.

The sources of the vicious message was that she'd decided that I and "unfriended" her on Facebook. That was news to me. First, I hadn't even logged onto Facebook in several months. Second, I'm not sure that I'd known that she was on Facebook or that I'd "friended" her there. Third, and finally, after logging onto Facebook and searching for an actual hour and a half, I still have no idea how one "unfriends" anyone. Please don't send me a response with detailed instructions on how to "unfriend" someone. I simply do not want to know. The real point of her message was a shout that translates as, "I'm here and you're not paying enough attention." Both points are true and might have been remedied by a phone call but the steam needed venting too and I'm far less likely to shy away after being scalded than a doctor or the impassive and relentless cancer.

I try to be in touch more frequently now but the other effect of that angry message was to get me to examine Facebook and how I feel about it as a site as well as linguistically.

I have friends most of whom have been close to me for between 30 and 50 years. They are genuine friends, people whose lives I have orbited, some closer, some farther away, from the days when we were children to the present in which we have grandchildren. They are my friends, my true and enduring friends.

I have other friends who are congenial people whom I know from some of my activities. I know this larger group of friends usually because we share a common interest or because we have worked in the same place bearing with the same horrid boss. A few of these friends I have never met face to face. A couple of them are in Sweden, a place I've never been. I think of them as friends as well but there is a difference born of duration and the comprehensive sharing of experience that characterizes the first, small group.

I also have acquaintances, the largest group of all, who come from the same spheres as the second group but whom I am in no way close to. I like their company, respect their abilities and knowledge but, nice and congenial as they may be, they are not anything like what I call friends. This is the group that tends to gather to me on Facebook. It's not that I don't like them. It's not that I don't care. But they are not my friends nor are they truly likely to be. I think their activities are sometimes interesting but I am not going to spend more that a couple of minutes every few months to find out what they are.

Friends, true friends, the first kind of friends I've described, are the family we choose for ourselves and who, better yet, who choose us. They aren't companies who want to keep us apprised of new products or offers. They aren't people who simply want our attention. They are the people who are godparents to our children. They are the people who know that they can phone us at 3:00 A. M. when the world had dealt them a blow and we will listen to their anger and tears because we love them and have loved them time out of mind with a love that no number of 3:00 A. M. phone calls can diminish.

So I may -may - link up with you on Facebook. But without that true friendship born of time and love and shared crises, you are not my friend. Don't be offended, please. It's just that true friendship isn't an Internet phenomenon. It is the absolute antithesis of "social networking". I may give a glance to you vacation photos, the pictures of your children or grandchildren or even the latest thing you want to sell me though the chance of that last is vanishingly small. Just don't delude yourself into thinking that because you have taken the time to do the linguistically foul act of "friending" me that we are friends. We are acquaintances at best. You are not like Lynn and Jeff, April, Anna, Richard and Anne, Harold and Karen, Michael and Rilla, Tony and K.R., Aleisha, my daughters all of whom know how to reach me without using Facebook.