I hope I'm not alone in my feelings towards Facebook friends - the sense of satisfaction when a friend request is accepted but also, more pertinently to this post, that feeling of disappointment and self-doubt when you realise a request you were confident would be accepted has been either rejected or worse still simply ignored and left hanging as a pending request. These feelings are even worse when you see these same people becoming friends with many of your friends and making you feel left out.
I could understand the rejections if I was sending requests to random strangers I had never met and/or had little in common with, but I'm not in the habit of doing that. All of my requests go to people I have met and spoken to in real life, mostly fellow students at the university where I work/study. In the majority of cases they are already friends with at least ten (sometimes 30 or 40) of my friends and occasionally I was even introduced to them by a mutual friend, which is what makes the rejections all the more surprising. I realise I could ask them why next time I see them but that just doesn't seem appropriate somehow and could put me in an awkward position if they feel I am pressuring them into accepting my friend request.
As explained in a previous article, I currently have an unusual and undesirable work situation that is not of my own choice, being based in a rather isolated attic room of the quieter campus with a group of Middle Eastern research students who speak to each other only in Arabic and have a limited English vocabulary. The majority of the English-speaking students live and study at the other campus that is nearly a mile away and I have no reason to visit on work-related matters, so I only get to see them infrequently at social events and don't have much opportunity to chat there because of the loud music and other distractions. That may give a false impression of me not being very friendly and I have to rely on the internet to keep in touch with them otherwise, so this is why Facebook friends are so important to me.
In light of this, it is always with some trepidation that I send someone a friend request as I can never be sure which way it will go - I know it's stupid and I'm reading far too much into it but I can't help taking friend request rejections personally and wondering what I might have done to make them reject me while accepting my friends. On the other hand I have received and accepted incoming requests from people I have only met briefly and yet seem keen to be Facebook friends with me, so the logic of the real world really doesn't seem to apply to the online world - as a logical computer scientist that doesn't make sense to me and I guess that's what upsets me as I can't rationalise it.
Some examples:
- One girl I have known for several months and often see in person always talks to me when I see her and gives the impression of liking me but has twice rejected my friend requests.
- Someone who introduced himself to a group of my friends and myself, not having met any of us before, became friends with the other members of that group but rejected me.
- One person actually accepted my request but then immediately un-friended me before I had even read the notification of their acceptance. That one confused me so much at first I thought it was actually a Facebook glitch, then I realised what they had done. What was the point of that?
- Of the latest half-dozen requests, I got an immediate acceptance from the one I had only just met and who had only a handful of mutual friends so I was least confident of being accepted.
- The others I have spoken to several times and we have large numbers of mutual friends so I was quite confident they would accept but they have all just left my requests pending. I know they have been active as I see my friends becoming friends with them but they just ignore my requests for some reason.
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