Facebook friendship: Not by force, right?

“The strangest thing happened to me on facebook recently. When I first joined this social media platform, I friended only my ‘real’ friends i.e. Those I related with everyday. I didn’t think it was necessary to have a thousand facebook friends of which 99% of them would be people I barely, or didn’t, know.

But like every craze, I soon fell under the influence of peer pressure. All my friends (and they were just about thirty of them then) had hundreds of facebook friends and this made me feel unliked so I started to accept every friend request that came my way. Doing this opened the gate to some crazies like my facebook friend, Godwin.

I was online one day when Godwin started chatting with me. He claimed to be a fellow Nigerian who’d migrated to one of these far off countries in search of greener pastures. I was bored so I chatted back, asking him questions about life over there and the kind of challenges that came his way. He was willing to narrate his experiences and it’s not like I had anything better to do then so I let him go on.

About a week later, I logged in to find messages from him, complaining about my absence from facebook and I wondered – ‘is this guy alright?’ Of course, I ignored the messages and went about my business. Unfortunately for me, he came online while I was still logged in and sent me a message; I ignored it and he sent me another one which I still ignored, promptly logging out.

Days later, I logged in and there was my new stalker friend in the form of about seven messages in my inbox, asking if I didn’t see his chats. I ignored it but as my terrible luck usually goes, at that moment, he came online and sent me a message which I still ignored. He sent me several messages and I just continued to ignore them. This must have upset him because he now sent me a final warning, threatening to defriend me if I didn’t respond to him. According to him, if I don’t want to be friends anymore, then he didn’t want to be friends with me either. Imagine that …is friendship by force? Hah!! This was a strange dude I didn’t even know and probably just accepted his friend request to increase my number of facebook friends.  Shame on me for falling under the facebook ‘multitude friends’ pressure.”

PS. I came across this small write up on facebook friends which made a lot of sense. See the link to read it up. http://www.milindat.com/2010/11/facebook-friendship/