The decision to shut my Facebook page down has been a long one coming. I've been on Facebook since.......2005? Yea, I think that's right. Six years. Wow. Anyway. For the past few months I've considered shutting it down. Then I'd wake up and go back to posting and looking at pictures. Facebook in 2005 was different, though. You'd go out and meet people, ask them for their names and then search for them later on. You'd poke each other to say hello. You'd write cute messages when someone's birthday rolled around. It was innocent then. Somewhere down the line, though, it changed. There's a certain type of people who peruse Facebook now. They request you but never speak to you in real life. And those were the people who I didn't want on my page. But the number of them became too overwhelming. I grew weary of deleting folks. And what confused the heck out of me were the people who re-requested me when we haven't spoken in forever (or even worse, only spoke because we went to college together). That confirmed that they were semi-stalking my page. But that's neither here nor there.

Here is why I finally broke up with Facebook.

I lost interest.If I never removed one "friend" from Facebook, I'm sure I'd be well over 1500 "friends". That's way too many people looking at my pictures and personal information. Yea, maybe I shouldn't put it on the internet but it's my choice on who I want to be able to see it. And if I don't know you from Adam, why are you on my page? Unfriend.I became a professional investigator.Not to be confused with a stalker. I became very good at it too. You suspect your dude of cheating? Leave it to me and I can predict if he was or not. And I was almost always right. It was very helpful in recent years in finding out what kind of guy was approaching me. But I won't tell you how. I still have a business to run. Call me. Lol.No family ties.One of the main reasons I kept my page open was because I wanted to keep in touch with family. When everyone lives in a different state, it's hard to see each other outside of the occasional funeral or wedding. By then, children have grown, couples have divorced, drama has subsided. No fun! Well, needless to say, that after finding out eight months in that my cousin was pregnant, I sure wasn't keeping in touch.Twitter.I mean, I could end it right there and write a whole 'nother post about that. Actually, I already have. See here. But basically, as far as networking and really connecting with people, Twitter is a better outlet for me. I love pictures and all that jazz but I didn't see a point of posting them on Facebook anymore.I was obsessed!Yes. Out of the 400 plus people on my page, I viewed the same maybe 20 pages religiously. If they only knew...Personal relationship building.As much as I love social media, if you let it get too far, you will lose basic interpersonal communication skills. Like...how to speak when you're in a group of people. I've met some people, Facebook and Twitter, who have absolutely NO social skills but are most certainly brave behind a computer screen. I'll admit, I'd prefer to text or tweet than to talk on the phone with most people but relationship building takes work. And, I still speak regularly to the same people outside of social media. I'm hoping this will force me to continue to seek face to face interactions.I'll definitely miss all the pictures of the children growing up. After all, Facebook is really for baby pictures. It's almost a competition to see who has the cutest kid, lol. But my hope is that I've already built close enough bonds with some folks that I can travel to see their kids in person and not depend solely on a photograph.So thankful for this post on the blog Those Graces because it led to me closing my page. It's only been a week but I'm okay with my decision. Time to put that time to better use.