Social media and space in friendships

pinballwitch · 2015-08-04 15:54:41

This might be rather a pathetic post - I'm more comfortable giving advice to others and this seems a bit teenage. Though if social media had been around when I was a teenager I might have figured this out by now. With close friends I tend to have phases of very frequent contact and then lulls - recently there are some friends I've been leaning on a lot and I think they need a rest. I like my space and it's always felt healthy to me to have those lulls and breaks. But it's bothering me that it's not possible to do that and also use social media to communicate with other people. It's usually possible to choose whose content you read. On facebook you can at least choose the audience for your own posts (though I don't want to shut out close friends, so I don't, I just think it would be good for them to have a bit of a rest from me, and get a round up of stuff in a week or a fortnight rather than having all my posts in their face all the time). But on most other sites you can't filter like that, and it's just not done to remove good friends from your followers (it would be a terrible insult after they've been so helpful too) so you can still post stuff into the feeds of people you haven't been spending loads of time with lately. Just so two or three people can have a rest from me, I stop myself from posting anything at all, when there are things I could do with communicating to others, and it's all a bit inhibiting and frustrating. I perenially worry that I crowd friends or that someone's partner will have a problem with me, and having phases of saying less has always been a way of modulating that, and dealing with my own sense of having overdosed on certain people for a bit, but it seems to be impossible to do this now.

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