Adding Classmates on Facebook

A high school classmate of mine posted a picture to their Facebook page today, and it caused me to fall down a Facebook rabbit hole that's known as "where are they now."  As I browsed through this well-connected classmate's friends list, I noticed a few familiar faces and names, some that I hadn't thought about in 10 years, and some not so familiar faces.  Some must have been form other classes above and below me that I didn't know well.  For those of you reading this that didn't go to my high school, it was rather small, every graduating class had around 100 people in it.  I think ours had 111, if I'm not mistaken.  Anyway, it's somewhere around that number.

Like I said, I was browsing around and came across a name of a person (I'm not naming any names at all in this post, by the way) that I'd forgotten about, and like I said above, hadn't thought about in years.  She had pictures of kids, and I have kids, and I wondered if after all these years, we could reconnect on Facebook and perhaps relate to each other at this stage of life.  But the more I thought about it, adding friends on Facebook is a two-way street, and if she wanted to add me as a friend, she probably would have done so already in the past 4 years.  But then again, even in four years, a lot changes.  I'm a very different person than I was in high school, and I'm also a very different person than I was four years ago.  I just felt that sending a friend request would come across as awkward.  I mean, it's not like we were the best of friends throughout out school years.  In fact, those of you who are very close to me might pick up on the clues I'm laying down, I would venture to guess this girl very much disliked me throughout school, from the fourth grade until graduation.  But like I said, I'm a different person now that I used to be, maybe we could have a nice conversation?

But no, I didn't send the request.  I think at this point of Facebook, or all social networking in general, most of us are past the point of adding any friends.  Anyone we add now are new people we meet along our lives' journeys, or if we're new to Facebook.  If you're new to Facebook, I'm glad you finally got that rock off the top of you that you've been living under for so long.  We've reached the limit of networking with the people from our past.  We've gotten to the point where if you're not already in as a friend, there's a good reason, and that's because you're not actually friends, never were and never will be.  The people that are already in there, and have been there for years, I have no problem being connected to those folks.  Some of them, if we weren't already friends, at this point, I don't think I would send a request, but I'm also certainly not going to be deleting anyone anytime soon.

I'm open to reconnecting to the people from my past, like old classmates.  I just feel weird sending friend requests to classmates in 2013.  They've missed the boat, and they don't get to see 10,000 pictures of my kids like everyone else does.  Poor them.

-BJP