An old friend of mine from the eighties friended me several months ago, and I accepted his request. I shot him a brief email asking him how he was doing. No reply. Two weeks later, I observed on his Facebook page that he had logged in a couple of times and presumably checked his emails already. I don't like being ignored, and it creeps me out that somebody friends me after thirty years but refuses to communicate, so I unfriended him. I've been wondering at his motives since. Why friend somebody if you don't want to communicate with them?
I have to leave the familiar settings of my own style of thinking and enter into the Repitilian mind, which is cold and motivated by fear and greed. It is easy to divine the motivations of the Reptilian mind. I think the motive has to do with cultivating an impression of popularity through a lengthy friends list and attracting a captive audience for Facebook postings. In other cases, "friends" from the past are interested in whether any of their former acquaintances have become successful, and if so, whether they could be useful. Networking.
I've considered more unlikely motivations, as well, that border on the territory of paranoia, such as "a mutual friend (or not such a friend) of ours asked him to friend me to check up on me and see how I was doing," but decided that I really don't care. If someone chooses to go the stealth route to obtain information about me that I would freely offer if simply asked, that reflects poorly upon them and amuses me. I say let them spin their wheels.
What amuses me further about this old friend of mine is the memory I have of our last contact, long ago when we were in middle school. He was fonder of me than I was of him, because I think that he had a crush on me. But he was too small, frail and not my type. I remember his mother used to call him "Peepee." He moved to Florida. As promised, he wrote to me--in those days, that would mean a handwritten letter--and I did not write back for several months or possibly even a year. That meant the score was 1-0 in my favor, because I had ignored one of his letters and he hadn't ignored any of mine.
Later I reconsidered, because I am always impressed by people that like me, whether I like them back or not. Sometimes I fear I must be mistaken about people, that they are better than I think they are, if they show any appreciation of me. I wrote him a letter, but perhaps I did not strike just the right note. To my surprise, he ignored my letter and never wrote back. That evened the score to 1-1, and I thought that was the end of the matter, and we could call a tie to the competition, until he friended me three decades later. Perhaps he friended me just to ignore another one of my letters, to make the score 2-1, meaning he wins and I lose. Oh well. I'm a good sport. I find it rather amusing. I wonder if he still holds a smoldering flame for me, after all these years. That would also explain why he could not manage to compose a simple email reply.
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