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With Facebook, there’s always something to make you happy or make you obsess. It affects our mood in many ways, sometimes good and sometimes bad. Think about someone unfriending you and someone not accepting your friend request.
Do you flinch just thinking about these situations? They are the equivalent of an in-person snub. It’s a digital slap in the face.
Someone unfriending you
It’s quite awesome Facebook helps us literally save face by not alerting us when someone unfriends us. Thank you, Facebook.
For all Facebook does to put everything else front and center — measured by the number of Likes and Comments which gives posts higher priority in your Newsfeed — it does spare us this unpleasantness.
Really, it’s bad enough to know we aren’t invited to things and to see everyone looking great and having fun. We don’t also need to be notified we are no longer friends with so-and-so.
For all Facebook does to notify us about every move people make, it spares us the gory details when it comes to unfriending.
You are left on your own to figure it out if and then when you’ve been unfriended. We think this is a very good thing.
For whatever reason, you were once friends on Facebook and now you are not. Someone broke up with you and didn’t even want to have a virtual connection. It’s over.
Whatever you do, don’t ask to be Facebook friends again.
How do you know if someone unfriended you?
When do you figure out you are no longer Facebook friends?
It usually happens when you find yourself thinking you haven’t seen any posts from someone in awhile. So you look him/her up to make sure everything is okay. Bam! You don’t see that person in your list.
Your mind races. You think, “Wait, was I ever Facebook friends with this person?”
Then with dread, you remember, “Yes, I’m sure I was. I even remember seeing….”
And more thoughts, like, “What happened? Is she mad at me? What did I do?”
Now your detective skills come into play…. a little cyber-sleuthing.
You search for her, and you see her name come up, so you know 1.) She’s still on Facebook and 2.) She didn’t block you.
Unfortunately, this makes it worse. Now you realize she’s still on Facebook but has chosen to no longer be Facebook friends.
“When did she do it? Is this recent?”
You know this person has Mutual Friends with you so you click on her name. It’s easy to look at your Mutual Friends to see if any other logical person isn’t there.
Perhaps with dread you realize: Everyone is on there except for me.
Why?
And now what? Do you ignore it? Do you go on as usual?
What to do when someone unfriends you
Each situation is different but you want to be sure you don’t embarrass yourself. No sense feeling worse than you do now. This means you probably don’t want to send her a Friend Request and have to deal with her not accepting it. (See below for how this will also unnerve you.)
It’s bothersome. You still are making up excuses. Maybe her account was hacked?
The times people unfriend you are troubling because you are left to wonder why. Then you start wondering who else may have unfriended you.
So you start thinking up other people to check and confirm you are still Facebook friends with them.
Try not to stress about this. Don’t let it make you feel bad.
Don’t even look at how many Facebook friends you have because when you notice the number goes down, you will be left to obsess and try to figure out who it was.
Someone not showing up in a Facebook search
If the person doesn’t show up in the search bar, she either deactivated her Facebook account or blocked you.
If the person deactivated her Facebook account, stop obsessing now.
It’s nothing to take personally and has nothing to do with you. (It’s not as common as unfriending, but still a possibility.)
If she blocked you, that’s adding insult to injury. Not only did she not want to be Facebook friends with you, she doesn’t want you to find her at all on Facebook.
Hopefully, you won’t have to see this person in real life. If you do, go on as usual and don’t bring up the topic of her blocking you on Facebook.
Reasons people unfriend on Facebook
People have their reasons, and if you don’t know the reason, it likely is her problem and not yours.
Many women may do it as a power play and because they are competitive.
We know someone who moved away and unfriended all the friends from that city because she would never see them again. That may seem illogical as that would be the reason you would want to keep them as friends.
She has different Facebook friend criteria than people who want to have a lot of friends on Facebook aka the Facebook Friends Collectors.
There’s another good friend we know who purposely keeps her Facebook friends list very small — less than 30 people.
There’s another friend who unfriended all the local Facebook friends she had. She did it because she instead wanted to have real conversations with them because they were local. She saved her Facebook friends for friends and family who were out of town.
Others may unfriend you for petty reasons. I had a Facebook friend who unfriended me because I didn’t go to her sales party.
Someone not accepting your friend request
Another situation which makes people feel mortified is someone not accepting your friend request on Facebook.
If it’s a person who is seldom on Facebook, no worries. He or she probably didn’t see it.
But if it’s an active Facebook user, this can be really embarrassing.
It’s hard to remember things aren’t always as they seem, so it’s easy to assume she is ignoring you. This may or may not be the case.
It’s also easy to come up with likely excuses to make yourself feel better.
Someone purposely not accepting a Friend Request
This person may not want to accept your Friend Request for a power play.
Does this person seem like someone who might intentionally ignore your Friend Request to leave you hanging? Some people do this. These are the same people who intentionally withhold Likes.
Others may purposely wait to accept your request, which is another power move.
There may be blasts from your past who don’t want to connect with you. Some people intentionally keep their Facebook friends to a very limited number of people; they don’t want to have hundreds of friends.
So it may not be you, it may be them. But then again, maybe it is you.
There will be some people may never accept your Friend Request. This is especially true if you are new in town or they aren’t quite certain of who you are. Others like to keep their Facebook Friends to true, real friends and family.
Someone not accepting a Friend Request
There are other reasons someone might not accept a Friend Request, especially right away.
The person may not have seen it.
Or she may have seen it but wasn’t in a position to Accept Friend so she didn’t. And then she forgot about it. Once you click on the Notification, it won’t be highlighted again.
The only way for this person to see it is to manually go in and see all the people who have asked her to be friends. The requests/people remain there until you manually Remove Friend Request.
As with someone unfriending you, most likely, you will never know the reasons for someone not accepting your Friend Request. All you can do is hold your head high, try not to obsess about it, and above all, don’t reach out to them again via Facebook.
You certainly don’t want to embarrass yourself further.
What to do when someone doesn’t accept your Friend Request
There’s a fellow mom in my small community who didn’t accept my Friend Request. What to do?
She is someone more entrenched in the social scene than I am. She’s someone who seems to already have her friend group and isn’t seeking new friends.
Still, how hard is it to “Accept” a Friend Request? Especially given we have 15+ Mutual Friends. And we live in a small town where everyone knows everyone.
All the times we’ve seen each other, at the very least, we gave each other a smile and a hello. Oftentimes, more than that.
It was a natural thing for me to reach out via Facebook. It was by no means a reach. (Does this sound like high school?!)
But she didn’t accept the request. It was quite maddening.
I ran into her a few times when my request was lingering out there. It really bugged me she didn’t accept it; she’s active on Facebook. I see her tagged in many Mutual Friend’s posts.
I can’t say anything to anyone about it. My goal is to look like I don’t care.
Instead of letting that Friend Request hang out there — giving her more power if it’s a power play — after about three weeks, I removed my request.
My rational was that if she deleted it by mistake, she could easily send me a new request, but she didn’t.
So now, any time her name pops up as a Friend Suggestion, I remove it.
Whenever I see her, I’m my polite, usual self. But deep down, I know to not engage further.
She knows where to find me if she wants to.
Facebook bringing you down
Facebook is awesome in so many ways. It gives us a way to connect to practically anyone we want to.
There are reasons our emotional highs are tied to how many Likes we get or how congratulatory or complimentary the Comments on our posts are.
But there are many times Facebook isn’t positive or good for us.
At times, we feel like our life isn’t measuring up to everyone else. People post about their perfect families and kids with perfect vacations, meals out, etc. Everyone seems to be living a more interesting life than we are.
What magnifies this is that often we log on Facebook when we are procrastinating. Other times, we’re lonely, anxious, or a bit bored. Sometimes we log on when we only have a few minutes and are already stressed.
We don’t always consciously realize things on social media aren’t always reality. People post their best selves and that’s what we see.
Unfriending and not accepting your friend request
And when it comes to Facebook problems, someone unfriending you and someone not accepting your friend request are among the worst.
For all of the greatness that Facebook brings to our lives, being virtually discarded or ignored are some of the problems that affect us.
Don’t you despise these situations? It’s so awkward. And the worst part about being unfriended or about someone not confirming your friend request is that most of the time, you will never know why.
Most emotions you feel from Facebook posts and comments are private. You can brood and sulk and obsess and wonder alone.
When it comes to someone unfriending you and someone not accepting your friend request, these involve at least one other person. It magnifies your embarrassment. You can only hope others don’t notice it.
It helps to remember, however, is people use Facebook in many ways.
Above all, maintain your dignity. Do whatever you can to look like you don’t care. It’s a good way to save face and (at least appear) to be taking the high road.