Deleting Facebook Friends

I have noticed a trend amongst my FB friends. It has now officially been four years since I graduated high school, and a vast majority of my peers have graduated college are entering the workforce. A requisite side-effect of this, it seems, is noticeable changes to one's FB profile resulting from a "cleaned house." Yes, it's time to be ADULTY. Now cognizant that prospective employers will be looking at their FB pages, a person's picture count will drop from 1,700 to 300 as they un-tag all vestiges of four drunken years. Their "Favorite Quotes" section will suddenly contain the likes of Thoreau, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, rather than something crude their BFF said during a round of beer-pong. I have even had friends whose FB profiles were so incriminating, that they deleted them entirely and started anew. While it may seem like I'm poking fun at these people, in reality what they're doing is very, very smart. 

One aspect of this "cleaning house" phenomenon that I have not yet mentioned is perhaps the most dreaded task of all: Deleting friends. I have seen friend counts drop from 1000+ to 250 or lower. And when this happens I can't help but think...

DON'T YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING A BIT TOO SELECTIVE?!?

I say this because I, too, once tried to do this. I looked at my friend count of 800+ and resolved to get that down to my bare bones friends--the ones I would die without! The ones who I couldn't imagine never speaking to again! The ones I truly, truly cared for! In a flurry of deletions, pages and pages of people were gone! It felt so clean...so right...I breathed a sigh of relief and returned to my profile page to take at look at my new bare bones friend count.

630.

What? How could this be?? I'd been heartless, nay, cutthroat in my selectivity! But apparently not cutthroat enough, so I went back to have a second go at it, starting from the very beginning.

I realized this was going to be harder than I anticipated. Jacob Thompson? As if! We were the leads in the fourth-grade Christmas play together! Emily Rubin? You can't just delete your token Jewish friend. I even went to her bat mitzvah...straight up legit right there. And we just happened to be on the same flight from JFK to DIA one time, which was way random. The universe obviously still wants us to be friends. Brodie Wright? Um hellooo he's BLACK. Well, not really black. Like Obama black. In any case, deleting him could be racist. Not to mention I KISSED HIM ONE TIME. We only talked to each other once after that...but STILL. You can't just delete a BLACK PERSON THAT YOU KISSED IN PROVO. That's like a once-in-a-century occurrence.

As I scrolled through my friend list and attempted to muster the heart (or lack of heart?) to delete people, I realized that it was a futile effort. Maybe I'm too much of a softie, but I think deleting FB friends is like deleting memories. Or like throwing away the little puzzle pieces that make up your life. But just because people hold a tiny place in my heart doesn't mean that they're not in there at all.