Breaking up with Facebook

Dear Facebook,

     It's been a long journey....a very long journey...It all started when we met senior year of college at THE Ohio State University.  You let go of your pretentiousness for only those that attended Harvard or Yale.  Oh how fun it was in the beginning, setting up our profile, putting our relationship status, checking out everyone else's relationship status, adding our friends who went away to different colleges, 'friend-ing' each new sorority sister, and then we decided it was perfectly okay to 'friend' every random dude that we met at frat parties who we may or may not ever run into again (it was senior year after all).  We proceeded to post every drunken picture from tailgates, house parties, and sorority functions.  No worries about privacy in the early days.  Then we celebrated our first milestone together....graduating from college, along with all of our other friends, sorority sisters, and 'friends'.  Then we packed up and moved to Iowa for chiro school....This is when the real fun began...
    Grad school was the start of our long emotional journey together.  We met so many new people during the first trimester alone.  'Accept', 'accept', 'accept' with each new friend request.  Every new class member we met, every person we met at the bars downtown on the weekends, every single person we had a conversation with.  "Are you on facebook?" became the standard question after every new association made.  We posted silly quotes and more drunken pictures from our crazy weekends after studying so hard all week.  We kept in contact with our friends from other chapters in our life who moved all over the US.  At some point during those glorious 3.33 years of grad school, we received a friend request from John Smith and Jane Doe from high school.  Did we ever talk to John and Jane in high school.  Pretty sure that's a no.  John however did manage to spray paint on my basement walls when him and his 'gang' crashed my party in high school.  Yes John, let's become friends 5 years later on the computer.  Makes perfect sense.  Sometimes he even 'likes' my status.  My how we've become close.  The high school friend requests doubles over time.  Tell me again, why do we want to go back to high school?  Oh the dilemma of whether to 'accept' or 'decline' those friend requests.  As we got sucked in deeper and deeper, we hit 'accept' repeatedly. 
    We had lots of fun dating in grad school.  With each new beau, each boy we dated, and "dated", we added as a friend, failing to de-friend when we were done dating.  Oh no of course not.  We are absolutely okay with being friends with our exes on facebook.  No problem, really.  It's perfectly okay when we come home drunk at 2am to go on the computer and proceed to stalk---seeing who the ex's new "person" is, looking at pictures, checking out their wall.  This never bothered anyone.  Let's just hope we were too drunk to remember what we looked at the next morning.  Oh but we had some good times with some great guys.
    Then came the very bittersweet day of graduation.  Status after status of, "Congratulations class 091!" and "Good Luck!" and "I will miss you class 091!".  Oh what a glorious journey we had in Iowa...
    We headed down the road to the real world.  We started to realize that maybe all those drunk pictures, silly quotes and zero privacy aren't such a good idea before we headed to the job scene.  Delete.  Picture after picture.  Whole albums gone with the click of the mouse.  Cleaned up the profile just in case the prospective employers checked us out.  Learned how to set up the privacy settings.  Then we entered the professional world of facebook.  We learned about networking, making a 'page' for our business, and posting informational videos.  The new dilemma--Is it okay to 'accept' friend requests from patients?  As long as we privatize some of the pictures and wall feed, sure we can add some patients.  We'll teach them a lot about health and chiropractic.  We did a great job of this our first year in the real world.  We had wonderful wellness patients who actually watched our informational videos and 'liked' them.
    Then we moved to Virginia.  We met lots of new people down in the mountains.  One day we had 666 friends.  Was this a warning sign??  We had a job with too much free time which led to constant checking of the wall feed, the photos, and what's this person up to.  We became a little obsessed with each other.  At some point, we took a much needed break for a month.  We came back refreshed, ready to hang out once or twice a day.  Then the wall feed started becoming loaded with weddings and babies.  With each passing week, someone else was now engaged, married, or pregnant.  We never saw more belly pictures in our life!  Bellies of girls we never even talked to in high school.  Dare I say it's time to clean up the friend list.  De-friend random person I never talked to in high school, De-friend cute guy I met at a frat party, De-friend old patient from another practice.  We felt a little lighter and little less cluttered from our friend clean up.
     Life continued to move on and for whatever reason we grew more and more attached to each other.  We added family members that we haven't seen for years, we recover even more high school friends that we run into at our hometown bars, added more professional contacts, etcetera.  Then we moved all the way to Singapore.  Thank god we have each other thousands of miles away.  Now we can always make sure we know what's going on back home.  This was the beginning of our downward spiral (or did that begin a few years ago?)  At some point, we needed a break.  That lasted a month, but really it was the break before the break up...
     I'm done with your pettyness and "poor me" statuses.  Your life sucks?  Well get off the computer and do something about it.  I'm finished with your extra detailed description of every little thing that you're doing today.  I really don't care and frankly, neither does anyone else.  I'm done with your 500 baby pictures.  Babies are adorable and you're proud of your little one, I get it.  (I love babies).  So post the best 50 pictures and then go spend time with your little one who won't be so little the next time you log off facebook.  We had some kick-ass awesome times together, we laughed, we cried, we even inspired others.  It was the best of times and it was the worst of times....You were a huge part of my life for 7 years.  Will we ever reunite?  Only time will tell...

Love,
Me