i received an email from facebook today/yesterday/last week saying that you have requested to be added as my friend. i have been doing some thinking about what it means to be someone’s friend lately. it was partly brought about when i was walking down the main street of the town where i live, and coming towards me on the other side of the road, walking in the opposite direction was a work colleague with whom i have been trying to make friends for a number of years. there are certain things we have in common, but there are plenty of ways in which we are different. we have exchanged a number of gifts. we have worked together successfully on a couple of projects. i respect his intelligence. but there is something lacking in our relationship. i wouldn’t call it a friendship. it doesn’t have the level of intimacy or trust required, in my mind at least, for our relationship to be called a friendship, and he has resisted my gestures to take the relationship further, and i have made it clear, i think, that i am, to all intents and purposes, heterosexual; so it can’t be because he is worried that i want to have sex with him. i can only interpret his behaviour as : he doesn’t want to be my friend. he is happy to be collegial, cordial and to engage in light hearted banter, or to have a rant about a work issue with me. but whilst he is friend-ly, he does not want to be, what i would consider, a friend.
fortunately for me i am not a particularly needy person, i am quite self sufficient. i can entertain myself for days on end without feeling the need for any human contact at all, so i am not bothered by this. but i can imagine some people being quite shattered when their obvious gestures at wanting to be someone’s friend are rejected. this particular day i decided not to cross the road to say hello to him, and he didn’t cross the road to say hello to me either. i had a look over a couple of times to see if he had seen me, it seemed like he hadn’t. i kept walking and so did he. which brings us to facebook, and “your” “request” to be my “friend”.
… wants to be your friend