Apologies- earlier, you may have received an incorrect, unfinished draft version of this article due to a glitch with my editing on the Substack app. This is the correct version. Thanks for your patience!
The other day on Twitter, a relatively small account went viral for the following story: she had a Twitter mutual who began commenting and private messaging her very frequently, attempting to escalate a casual Twitter connection into a real friendship. She got weird vibes and worried this was becoming a one-way parasocial thing, so she ignored it. Eventually, the person asked why she didn’t want to be friends. Figuring honesty was the best policy, OP told them that she didn’t feel the friendship was emerging naturally and the one-sided dynamic made her uncomfortable.
I thought this tweet went viral because it just happened to be an awkward story. But in fact, people framed OP as the villain. Not for sharing the story at all (which, yes, might be upsetting to the subject of this story, although she said it happened on a different account) but for rejecting the would-be Internet friend at all.
Some people are neurodivergent, you know. Wow, this person poured their heart out to you and you stomped on it. Neurotypicals be like! THIS is why nobody makes friends anymore. This is “anti-human” language. No wonder we’re in a loneliness crisis.
(OP was apparently autistic herself, leading me to believe that every Internet story involves a minimum of 70% autistic characters. But that’s neither here nor there.)
Either way, you get the gist—because she didn’t want to be friends with this particular person (an Internet stranger) she was “heartless,” and people like her, who have the gall to reject potential friends, are apparently responsible for why everyone is socializing less.
But I argue that people like OP are not the reason that friendships are hard to make. People like OP are doing something very normal which has been done as long as humans have socialized—deciding “Eh, this person isn’t for me.” The problem is that people have become so sensitive to any negative feelings or discomfort that being rejected for a low-stakes Internet friendship has become “getting your heart torn out,” a serious enough degree of trauma to scare you off making friends with anyone ever again.
I am very pro-socialization. I’m always telling people to go out, make friends, throw and attend parties, and as many millennials might say, do the thing. But I am not encouraging this behavior because I believe rejection will never be part of the experience, nor do I think anyone who rejects a potential friend or romantic partner is breaking some imagined social contract where everyone has to like everyone. Have people been stuck online for so long that they forgot it’s actually very normal—if not universal—to occasionally not want to befriend someone?
