Because of having a lot of kids, I meet a lot of other moms. Many of them I recognize from years of seeing them in passing at events but I don’t know why specifically they’re familiar to me: were our eldests in preschool together? maybe her kid was in track with my kid? maybe our kids are in band together? maybe we both just have kids in the school system so we see each other around. Sometimes it gradually happens that we get to know each other: we happen to sit near each other at an event and we chat a little, and then later that year we’re standing in line next to each other and we chat a little more, and then finally I know whose mom that is and how we know each other, and if I LIKE her that’s when I come to the big decision, and that’s whether or not to send a Facebook friend request.
I put up a poll yesterday because I was wondering which of two particular kinds of anxiety people have in similar situations. (I know there could be lots of other kinds involved, but these were the specific two I was wondering about.) The poll isn’t over yet, but here’s how it looks right now; I’ll try to remember to update this screenshot when the poll ends:
Edited to add: Here is the final result, which is almost exactly the same:
I was wondering if most people, when they send a Facebook friend request to a casual acquaintance, feel more anxiety about being REJECTED, or about being accepted but the other person didn’t really want to. Like, when you send the friend-request, which outcome makes you feel more stressed to think about: the other person doesn’t accept your friend-request? or the other person DOES accept it, but with a groan because they felt obligated to do so?
I know we can’t know what the other person is thinking/feeling. Like, we don’t know if they didn’t accept the friend-request because they’re never on Facebook, or because they only use Facebook for close friends/family, or because they didn’t see the request for some reason, or because they don’t know our name and our profile photo is of our cat or some flowers so they didn’t recognize us, or what; and we don’t know if someone who DOES accept the friend-request did so with joy, with a groan, or with the same mild “maybe it would be nice to know each other better” feeling in which it was sent. And I’m not saying any of this is anything we OUGHT to worry about: we can make our own decisions and let the other person make theirs, nothing ventured nothing gained, this could be considered a small-potatoes kind of situation, they can just mute us if they don’t want to see us in their feed, we are adults and this doesn’t have to be a big deal, maybe none of us should be on Facebook anymore anyway, etc. So all I’m asking is what YOU FEEL when you send the request: if you’re nervous, what is it that makes you nervous?
(If you’re NOT nervous, super! I know it can be tempting at times like these to express incredulity at the perceived silliness of other people’s feelings, which would only make the anxious people feel worse and so I value your restraint.)
My own anxiety is that the other person will have a heart-sink feeling when they see my request, but that they will accept it anyway because they feel too stressed about saying no, knowing they’ll continue to run into me, with me knowing they didn’t accept. I can talk myself through it enough to send the request anyway, but I do still wince. I don’t worry much that my request will be rejected.
But currently the poll shows there are more people whose main anxiety is that their request will be rejected. This is very interesting to me, and I’m thinking about it a lot: what is the difference between people with one anxiety and people with the other anxiety?
I wondered if it might be tied to the way each person feels when they get a friend-request from someone they don’t want to be friends with: that is, maybe people who accept friend-requests they don’t want to accept would also be the people who worry that their own request will be unwanted and accepted, while people who reject would be the ones who worry about being rejected. But I tend to reject unwanted friend-requests, and yet my anxiety is about being unwanted-but-accepted, so that doesn’t line up.
Well, or maybe it does: maybe the actual anxiety for those who worry about causing pressure is that other people might not have the same accept/reject system we have: lots of anxieties come from a fear of miscommunication, and this seems like it could tie into that. Maybe this poll represents a choice between “fear of rejection” and “fear of miscommunication”? But I’d say there’s more to it than that; I’m just not sure WHAT more there is to it.
What do you think? Which anxiety better describes you, and what do you think makes the difference between which people feel which of the two kinds?
I just think we have to trust people to have their own reactions, and then to manage them accordingly. I think if they’re even on social media, they are in the market for requests. I think if they don’t feel that way, they either leave it or they lock down their accounts with all of the privacy options.
I freely admit that receiver anxiety is just not my hill to die on.
I send virtually ZERO facebook requests for this reason. My anxiety is definitely of the “they will feel obligated to accept because NOT accepting is such a strong statement, and they don’t HATE me, but they really do not want to be FB friends with me, but I’ve cornered them into a situation that will be super socially awkward for them if they don’t accept” variety.
I had assumed (and from the poll, it looks like it is somewhat accurate) that this is NOT the usual feeling people have when they send a FB request, so I just wait for people to friend me as I assume it is not a Fraught Action for other people to undertake.
I am no longer on facebook, but when I first joined (back in the beginning) I literally didn’t understand that I could friend people. I thought the only way to get friends was to poke someone in order to alert them to my presence, and wait for them to friend me. That is the extent to which I was (am?) socially inhibited about asking for friendship. Never mind that is was obviously possible for anyone to friend anyone- how else would people friend me??
This is me, too. All my Facebook friends are people who initiated the friend request themselves except for the one long distance friend who pestered me onto Facebook in the first place. (She got a friend request with the comment, “Happy now?”)
Luckily for us, most of the people we want to be friends with on Facebook do not have this problem.
Exactly this. I don’t think I ever actively thought about why I never send friend requests, but I think it’s this idea that if people have actively sought me out to friend me, then I know they want to hear from me or have access to my page. There are one or two people I would like to friend (people I knew long ago), but I don’t because I think, well they know me, they may or may not remember me, if they really wanted to reestablish a connection they would. Of course, if they’re out there thinking the same thing about me, then I’m missing connections I could be having, but I assume most people feel like I do about it – there are so many reasons for people NOT to connect via social media that rejection is less offensive than actual, real-life rejection would be, so they would risk it if they wanted to. I’d just rather not obligate people to accept requests they don’t want to.
Then again, I am that awful person who neither accepts nor rejects – I just let unwanted requests sit in my queue remaining unaccepted, so.
Like you, I tend towards the first fear. I think it may relate to the fear of burdening others which is something I struggle with generally. Similar worries crop up when interacting in other ways (approaching someone to say hello, or giving someone a gift). Like you, I picture the other person internally groaning before they perform the socially required response (accepting the friend request, indulging in small talk, or writing a thank you note). That said, rejection is never easy to accept. But for me it comes as a secondary wave of fear after the interaction has already been initiated.
Swistle–this whole concept has blown my mind! I think the anxiety must correlate with one’s own feelings about accepting/rejecting others’ friend requests.
In fact, I had no idea people were routinely rejecting friend requests. I have a Facebook account I don’t really use (three friends, really it’s just there so I can access a couple of documents for a group I’m part of), but I’ve been operating under the assumption that the site still works like it did a few years ago, when I WAS active: I.e., that people perceive value in having as many Facebook friends as possible, and that a Facebook friendship carries none of the obligations of actual friendship–you don’t have to communicate with or even LIKE your Facebook friends. From the sidelines, it appears that even finding someone’s social/political viewpoints isn’t a reason to reject their friend requests, since people love sparring on Facebook. I remember being in my early 20s and not wanting to accidentally stumble on activity among my ex-boyfriends or their new partners–maybe I would have rejected requests from people I knew only through them, if they’d sent them? But it would shock me to think of their taking that as a Statement on my part, versus just assuming I’d rather not dabble with exes.
What would I do if I were more active on Facebook today, and got friend requests from people I knew sort of a little bit? I’m having trouble imagining why I would reject them. If I knew them well enough to know I found them offensive (racist, misogynistic, bigoted, etc.), I would think we wouldn’t be looking for each other online. And if I didn’t know them that well, it would take until after I’d accepted the friend request to figure it out. I think I’d be one of the indiscriminating people who just categorically accepts and racks up so-called friends.
All of which is to say, I find it heartening to know that there are actually people who DO care to curate their Facebook friend lists, rather than just treating it like a numbers game. But it is also very DISheartening to know that the people whose friend requests I’ve ignored over the years (simply out of laziness/disuse) might think I have rejected them.
My experience is admittedly unusual, because I ran for office twice. So I tend to accept every friend request, unless I have don’t recognize the name at all and we have no (or very few) friends in common. I send very few, and usually only if we are standing next to each other at the time.
My feeling is that they can always mute me if they really don’t want to engage, or they can put me in acquaintances or something.
I do have anxiety that I am consistently being THAT person in social situations, but it doesn’t apply to FB.
I never realised this was a thing. As someone else said, I almost never send friend requests (and when I do, it’s usually because it’s been agreed in person – I meet someone, we hit it off, when we part company one of says something about friending on FB…). My anxiety is the other way round – when I receive friend requests. I don’t get many, but I do get a couple or so a week because I’m in FB groups for translators (that’s my job – translator), and some of these groups are HUGE, so there are often people who send out requests… I don’t usually know what to do – they might be “friends of friends”, but I don’t know them, but don’t want to reject them outright, but don’t necessarily want to have them see all the cat videos on my FB page… Such a dilemma! My current “solution” is to just ignore the requests – neither accept nor reject – but I recognise that this isn’t really a solution…
You can accept them, make them “acquaintances” and then set most of your posts to go to “friends only”
My bigger anxiety is that they won’t accept the friend request. I think that’s mainly because I’ll generally only decline friend requests from people I really don’t like, generally for a specific reason: e.g., we’ve had a conflict in the past, they have ethical views that strongly contradict with mine, or they’ve done something egregiously unkind to me or someone I know. There aren’t many people who fall under that category, and those who do probably have a pretty good idea of why I don’t want to be their friend. (Of course, I’ll also decline requests from people I don’t know, but I assume that’s not the kind of situation you’re asking about here.)
I have plenty of Facebook friends who I don’t know well and don’t have any desire to be closer to, and that’s fine. I don’t roll my eyes or groan or whatever when I get a request from someone who falls under that category, and I don’t accept them out of obligation. I don’t personally see a Facebook request as an invitation to be real-life friends–it’s more like, “Hey, we know each other, and I have at least somewhat of an interest in keeping up with what you’ve been up to.” To me, that’s a big part of what Facebook is FOR: maintaining casual contact with people I probably wouldn’t interact with regularly outside of social media.
Of course, I know full well that not everyone has the same criteria for accepting friend requests that I do, so my anxieties are largely unfounded. Some people only want to be Facebook friends with people they’re close to in real life, or they don’t know me as well as I think they do, or they prefer to keep their social media more private, and that’s fine! But last I checked, anxiety doesn’t care about those sorts of things.
You forgot the third kind of anxiety….that of the person who receives the friend requests but does not want them. I can be bitchy, I own it. But if we were friends in high school and I still wanted to be friends with you, we would be. A FB friend request 25 years later will not rekindle that which died appropriately a long time ago. Same with my boss, my boss’s boss and estranged family members. I can passively avoid blending these folks into my personal life but a FB request means I have to actively decide, reject or accept, and I am not entirely comfortable with that. I have been known to reject requests. I mostly ignore them like I would ignore these same people in the grocery store. This sounds so bad but it is enormously valid. I have lots of FB friends but I prefer to keep them my own little island of happy, well screened, like minded peeps.
I used to accept friend requests from anyone I knew so as to not hurt feelings. But I regret it. I have unfollowed so many people that I end up shocked when some forgotten childhood family friend turns out to be a fervent Trumper and writes something truly heinous on my ‘welcome immigrants’ post. Then I get to run into her at the playground and make unavoidable small talk. It’s insane. If I hadn’t moved back to my small hometown I like to think I would have unfriended most of my Facebook ‘friends’. I used to have a rush of anxiety anytime I received a messenger notice because I just knew in my gut it was from someone I had not true interest in chatting with. This has led to me requesting phone numbers of new friends (which are few) and forget Facebook connections. I basically wish I could delete everyone and just stay in my beloved Facebook groups, but I can’t. I mean, I can. But I don’t want to deal with the weird real life social ramifications. I have at least convinced my mother to avoid Facebook by letting her know that her church friends are the ones who say the most hateful stuff. Sigh. Facebook = mostly stress. I feel you.
Could you start a new Facebook account, and join your Facebook groups with that account. Then basically “orphan” your old account?
What you said above, among many other reasons, is why have have never set up a facebook account. Yes, I miss a lot of news/gossip not being in the “mom’s” FB groups of my kids’ school classrooms. Oh well! I’d rather not know all of that if it also means I get to avoid all of passive-aggressive and just plan aggressive drama that goes along with it!
Plus I don’t need (or want) to know mundane details of relative’s lives – lol.
When I friend people, I try to instantly forget I did it so if it’s never accepted I’ll have no idea. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. However, I feel pressured to accept other people’s requests because I know most people keep track of these things.
I don’t accept friend requests if I don’t know the person or if I see them being weird on other people’s timelines. I use my social media professionally too, so I have to be a little more selective. I’ve had some people on FB write some pretty tacky comments on newsy, professional posts and when I deleted their comments they messaged me to ask why. What an emotional can of worms it can be!
I worry about someone feeling obligated to accept my friend request. Like, they’re thinking that I think we’re much closer than we actually are. Even though I am usually happy to get friend requests from new “friends”.
My anxiety is the same as yours. I think it boils down to whether we’re more worried about making someone else uncomfortable (pressured) OR us being uncomfortable ourselves (rejected).
I rarely reject FB friend requests bc I use FB as my “lower threshhold” social media and Instagram as my “higher threshhold.” Way back when FB started I accepted everyone and now I have ALL SORTS of people (high school friends! Distant elderly relatives! Former work acquaintances!) that I really don’t care to share much with. So I basically take all comers and only use FB if I have a specific group or if I’m trying to get in touch with someone.
Instagram I’m much pickier, I routinely reject people bc I try to keep it only to friends/family I’m genuinely close to or really want to share with.
When I used to use Twitter (I quit after one too many fights/shamings/dust ups) I had a policy of NO IRL follows. Trying to keep the worlds from colliding!
I don’t operate with this particular anxiety, but I will tell you I usually feel flattered when somebody requests to be my friend and have always assumed everybody else felt the same about me. Haha. I would be flattered if Swistle wanted to be my friend!
I wasn’t aware that people could see when you reject their request. I thought you just stayed not-friends, so they wouldn’t be sure if they never sent a request or you chose not to accept but you left it in limbo or you rejected it. If people ARE seeing my rejections, well, I hope they aren’t taking it personally.
As I mentioned last night on Twitter; I only accept friend requests from people that I’d actually hang out with in real life and those people I usually see quite often and don’t need Facebook to “catch up”. What I didn’t mention? Most everyone in my life knows that I am rarely on Facebook – so I send out zero requests (so no anxiety) and 99 percent of the friend requests I receive; I usually don’t see. If I do happen to log on for some reason, I studiously ignore the notification button (again, this gives me peace of mind). I will admit to having asked/accepted a few family members that I regret – I should have known better – but it was after a death in the family and I was feeling fragile.
But I can totally see how this could be an angst riddled situation if one were to be on Facebook more than I am. If I were more invested in it, I would be a constant bundle of nerves!
I’m on the other side of this. I try to keep a very close circle on Facebook, because I post mostly pictures of my kids. And so, I ignore or decline friend requests from anyone who isn’t truly an intimate part of our life. Now that FB makes friend suggestions any time I give someone my phone number, I get a lot of friend requests from acquaintances from church or the kids’ schools. I feel so much anxiety about not accepting them, because I don’t want to make them feel like I don’t like them. Usually I do and I might eventually want to be FB friends, but we’re not close enough yet.
This is where “facebook purgatory” comes in- you can just leave them pending until you, later, might want to add them (or make a definitive NO). I do this a lot with people I vaguely know, or have met once or twice, or don’t want to actively reject but don’t really need to be friends with. To them it will just show as pending if they happen to look at your page again.
I don’t feel any anxiety about fb friend requests, but I generally don’t send them. I accept any relative of mine or my husband’s, anyone I’ve met in person, and if someone is a spouse/significant other of someone I’ve friended, and I know it, I’ll say yes to them, too. Whether or not I’ve met them. And if down the line they turn out to be someone whose posts I don’t want to see, I either mute them or unfriend them, depending how much their posts annoy or anger me. (A husband’s relative who reposts 20+ sayings about Being a Mom daily gets muted–maybe it’s a phase she’ll get past. The high school guy I barely knew who used the n-word was unfriended. Unforgivably racist.)
Lest you think I’m some easygoing no-social-anxiety person, I will freely admit that I suck at talking to people that I don’t already know. My worst-case social situation is going to a party where I only know the host or only know the host plus one other person. I hate breaking into conversation groups, and end up moving around without talking to anyone, trying to look generally cheerful, and feeling like the queen of awkward. (And I would totally lean on my husband as someone to talk with, except he’s worse than I am. He has refused all non-family parties since we got married.)
But Facebook, to get back to the topic at hand… I think I regard it as so unmeaningful that I don’t stress about it. Plus I only send requests to people that I know well enough to believe that it’s fine.
I have both anxieties, which I think of as two ways to reject someone: either baldly or passively. So that makes it hard to pull the trigger and friend someone! This might be one of the reasons I quit facebook :)
I think my perception of my anxiety is different from what I actually ‘spend’ anxiety about.
Thinking about it abstractly, the idea that someone would feel obliged to accept my request is far worse to me than simple rejection.
But I rarely wonder whether *my* specific Facebook friends accepted me grudgingly. I do, however, become anxious and self-pitying about the people who didn’t accept my requests.
That said, I haven’t friend-requested anyone in many years, except a few family members. I think family members probably do feel obliged to accept, but I don’t seem to worry about it as much as I would have thought. The ones who didn’t respond, though? Periodic panics about why they don’t like me.
I don’t have anxiety about friending people but more so when I realize someone has unfriended me. Did I say something weird? Was it in person or on social media? I’m not very active on my account, but I tend to spend way too much time on the app admittedly – trying to figure out how to break that cycle. On occasion I’ve realized I’m no longer friends with someone that I know I used to be friends with and then my mind starts into what possible scenario made them unfriend me…
Yes! Also, when I unfriend someone and they try to friend me again!
Ash, I was going to write a nearly identical comment! (anxiety “when I realize someone has unfriended me.)
With a HS classmate, I figured he added me because he’s single and I never took my husband’s name, but it could have been my liberal politics (which I try not to be obnoxious about, but . . .)
One college friend unfriended me after she posted one of those general boilerplate “if you want to stay friends with me, comment on this post.” Too coercive, but I was shocked when she did it. Oh well.
But there’s a local mom of kids my kids’ age whom I used to spend time socially. I hadn’t seen her on FB in years and then my husband saw her irl, asked me about her, and I realized we were no longer FB friends. I couldn’t figure that out. Maybe she accidentally unfriended me? So after agonizing about it (and asking a mutual if she had any idea what might have been the reason), I sent her a new request. Which she accepted right away. I just checked, and we’re still friends, but perhaps she accepted and just muted me, heh.
A few years back, Facebook was just unfriending people for no reason! I had people asking me why I unfriended them, I didn’t. Then it unfriended a close family member, so I asked them. They said they didn’t unfriend me, then they found out the system unfriended a bunch of their friends.
This makes it hard because some people is it like did they unfriend me? or was it the system? do they think I unfriended them? I want to ask them but I don’t want anyone to feel pressured if they really didn’t want to be FB friends.
Definitely suffer from the pressured anxiety. I think it all boils down to whether you are the type of person who is overthinking social situations and forecasting what you think other people think of you and your shared social interactions. (I am.) It’s the adult equivalent of wondering if the poplar kids are talking about you as you walk past them in the hallway. (I did.) I suppose there exist people who don’t even think about what other people are thinking about them, and whether their social interactions are being judged.
One incident, in particular, soured me completely on sending out any friend requests on FB. I’d requested friending someone I knew and (I thought) was friends with back in high school. You know how it is — someone with whom you’d lost touch with but who seemed, still, to be a reasonably sane adult. She didn’t just reject the friend request: she sent a nastygram in reply that was completely unnecessary. Since then, my friend list has been pretty static. I’ll occasionally add someone who I *know* won’t reject a friend request (i.e., they said, “friend me on FB!” etc), but otherwise? I’ve given that up. If someone (this happens once every two years at the most) requests to be my FB friend, I’ll either accept it or (and this is the crucial bit, I feel), I quietly let their request go stagnant for a long time before finally rejecting it (and it’s usually either because they are actually a complete stranger to me or I know them well enough to know it’s better to keep a distance). I don’t want hurt feelings and I think sending someone a nastygram over a FB request is definitely not the behavior of a reasonable adult.
Of those two choices, my bigger fear is that someone will feel obligated to accept my request. If I send a request, it means I have evaluated the closeness of the relationship and I have every expectation that the request will be accepted. If it’s rejected, my calculations were off; we weren’t as close as I thought, and that’s okay. If it’s accepted, I was right OR I WAS SO WRONG UGH EMBARRASSING THEY ARE SUFFERING THROUGH MY HEAVY-HANDED ATTEMPT AT FRIENDSHIP.
If I don’t immediately want to accept a friend request, I don’t. I don’t reject it unless it’s clearly spam, I just let it sit there. Forever. I have 73 requests right now.
I fear imposing myself on them more and I don’t send a lot of requests.
But early in the FB game I did not accept my FIL’s friend request. I cannot stand his politics and my facebook posts are often reflective of my “liberal” worldview. So while I do generally enjoy discussing these things, even with people with whom I disagree, I loathe hearing him discuss them and do not want to encourage IRL conversations. [As just one example, he has great contempt for public servants of all kinds and I am a public school teacher who works her butt off and believes deeply in public education.]
Anyway, I then felt compelled to cover my motivations and thus not to accept FB friend requests from any of my inlaws of that generation (aunts, uncles….) since this was the time before you had control over who saw which of your posts. And by the time those settings came along I felt STUCK. I’m still uncomfortable over the whole matter and I am sure that/fear that the whole generation thinks that I am completely stuck up.
Well, I’m not on FB because I find the whole thought way toooooo stressful! I would spend my whole life thinking about things I’ve said and fretting about them so I just don’t go there.
I do however, know exactly which type of person I am because when I read the options one sent me into a cold sweat! I would absolutely, without a doubt fear someone accepting me and wishing they didn’t have to. I am someone who spends a lot of their time afraid that people secretly don’t like them. Putting things in writing (texts, on-line posts, emails) sends my anxiety through the roof (because I can go back and kick myself about word choices and all the possible ways I could be misconstrued). Also, I was raised NEVER to impose on anyone, under any circumstances. I mean we called the ambulance once for my elderly grandmother and she spent the whole time apologising to the paramedics for inconveniencing them. I’m from that family and the gene runs deep!
I’m trying to think of the last time I sent a FB friend request but I’m drawing a blank. I think my more recent acquisitions of friends are related to the gym, yet I AM friends with a few of my kids’ moms and can’t remember who friended whom or when. I think maybe I just wait for people to friend me unless we’ve already clearly established that we are at least sort-of friends in real life?
It seems like almost all the friend requests I get these days are from unknown men in other countries, and I reject those. Even if I get them from people in groups I’m in, I try to be relatively selective about who I am friends with on FB because I find it way more anxiety-inducing to unfriend someone than to just reject them in the first place.
https://captainawkward.com/2017/06/12/977-i-just-dont-want-to-be-your-friend/
I just stumbled across this post in the Captain Awkward archives. Helpful for people like me who find “no” difficult.
I am not that big into FB. I never send friend requests and I only accept requests from people I know well and/or am excited to connect with. My FIL is an ass. Religious zealot with right wing political views. He friended me. I ignored the request along with many many other requests.
I just don’t use FB that much and I assume people do not care that I often ignore their requests. If they do care that I do not accept their request? Oh well. I think people who know me and how busy I am know that FB really is not my thing. I have thought about leaving FB entirely. When I do go there, I find it a time suck.
I cannot believe that full grown people have stress over stuff like this. It reconfirms my belief that social media is the worst and that it brings out the worst in people. It’s as if everyone has signed up to be a neverending part of the worst part of junior high.
Disclaimer – I do not have a Facebook, but my cat has a does. He used to use it to give lives to my daughters who played Candy Crush. He now is a member of 5 groups that are based on Animal Crossing, Disney Blitz and Dooney and Bourke purses. His only friends are my daughters and their cats. Zero stress. The account is a happy place – people posting pics from their games, their closets and discussing that stuff.
My vote in the poll would be option 3 – don’t care either way.