Life Beyond the Keyboard

I’m starting 2009 with a resolution that makes me a freak to the rest of the civilized world.

I’m committed to avoiding Facebook for another year.

It’s not because I don’t think it’s the coolest idea. Ever. I could’ve invented it (technology notwithstanding). I have spent my life staying connected with people from the past. My adolescent years included four schools in five years and long summers spent writing letters to friends left behind. Keeping in touch is what I do. It’s also not that I’m not curious about the people who have moved in and out of my life. The problem is that I’m too curious. And too hungry for relationships. But the kind of relationships I desire are flesh and blood, face to face—and the good is the enemy of the best.

I attend weekly parenting classes at my daughter’s preschool, and a lot of the ideas I write about here were sparked by conversations there. One of those was, “Do not put any effort into nurturing relationships with screens; those will happen automatically. Instead, help your children build real relationships with real people.” Any good parent knows this instinctively, but it’s not bad advice for adults, too. I have a very limited amount of time to devote to relationships with people beyond those who live in my house. I can use those precious few moments to catch up with someone I didn’t even really enjoy twenty years ago, or I can call that woman I’m getting to know from my small group. The one with all the pain. The one who seems like she could really use a friend.

It’s a lot easier to “be there” for the cancer-stricken girl who used to sit next to me in eight-grade English than the cancer-stricken lady in the house next door. One is distant and noncommittal; the other is messy and in my face. That’s the problem with flesh-and-blood relationships: they get my hands all dirty. That’s why I’ve got to be committed to them; otherwise, I’ll just avoid them.

I have other issues with Facebook and its online-social-networking cousins—the ease with which people can portray themselves differently than they are in real life, hours lost at the computer, temptation to get sucked back into old, bad relationships—but it’s the idea of contentment with virtual relationships that really frightens me away. (What’s next? Virtual marriages? Virtual parenting?) It’s also what’s most tempting. What better way to cure my loneliness than to chat with 142 “friends” from the past—all in my jammies while the kids nap? It seems so perfect. Yet for me, it would just be a distraction, an anesthetic from my loneliness, instead of an actual cure. It would also trap me in my house, forcing my children to look at the back of my head for hours, and isolating me from the kind of life-on-life relationships I live for.

So, you Facebookers out there, get all caught up and share your Christmas pictures with that college roommate you never dreamed you’d hear from again. I envy you. And who knows, maybe some day I’ll join you. But for now, I’m resolved to avoid what for me is a very slippery slope.