Written by Sasha

Dear Sasha,I recently struck up a Facebook situation with a dude called Z. Even though we'd never met, I accepted Z's friend request. Before long, Z became regular fixture on my Facebook; 'liking' my updates, dropping witty comments, etc in a non-skeevy way. He seemed confident in a nerdy/sweet sorta way. Admittedly, I was intrigued.

Fast forward 3 months. I'd still not met Z in the flesh. He Facebook invites me to his birthday shindig at a local pub. I thought wtf, I may as well finally meet this dude, right?

So, I shimmied to Z's party, my friends in tow. Upon meeting me, he greeted me warmly with a hug. I started engaging him in convo but quickly realized the uber-confident dude who had been trawling my Facebook was a mythical creature. He got a case of the shy-face, seemed almost flustered chatting with me, etc. I cut the chit-chat short and excused myself. I suspected he was either disappointed with the real-life me (though he knew exactly what I looked like from my profile pics), or he wanted to mingle with his guests'.

I stayed for about an hour and then decided to bail. I approached him as we were leaving, and he was all smiles, thanking me for coming and telling me how awesome it was to *finally* meet me. I decided to throw it out there and said I'd be interested in seeing him again. He agreed and encouraged me to text him. Long story short, I never texted him. I wasn't sure if he was into me. Yes, I know this is *weak*! And I'm now second-guessing, hugely.

Sasha, help. I need some no-BS, unbiased advice. When I failed to text him, his presence on my Facebook slowly diminished to zero. I've tried on-line chatting a few times but response has been lukewarm. Did I f-ck up? Can I fix this?
School me, J.

J, I’m going to be straight up – you f-cked the dog a bit. Sorry, but you did.

Now, I don’t want to totally shiz all over you because I give you props for getting the courage to hit up his birthday party, BUT it’s not a surprise his facebook lovin’ has dwindled since then – I mean, you totally gave him social blue balls. If I was him, I’d feel totally confused.

But don’t freak your freak just yet - this isn’t a lost cause.

When one acts like a heat-score it’s important to remedy the situation with complete honesty and humility. So what you need to do is simple: engage in another facebook chat and be totally upfront. Tell him that you’ve been meaning to apologize for not texting him back, but the reason you didn’t is because you wigged out and didn’t think he was into you. Then admit that YOU were the one who got SHY-FACE.

Endearing/cute factor – check. Honesty – check. Game back on – check.

I know, I know. It feels like too much information, but this is the only way to go. Look, if he likes you, he likes you. And if he’s a normal and nice dude, you showing him that you’re interested isn’t going to frighten him away. So suck it up and get to it.

Now if he does bite, which I have a feeling he will, here’s my follow up piece of advice: make sure you don’t develop your relationship over social media. I don’t want to sound like an old cob-webbed vagina, but I feel it’s easier for people hide behind bbm, twitter, text and facebook. We rely so heavily on these mediums that we almost forget how to read what’s happening right in front of our faces. You know? I just don’t want that to happen to you.

Deal? Deal.

(Lainey: Please continue to refer to yourself as a cobwebbed vagina. )


I have a question about mixing Facebook & friendship at the office. Yikes.

Background: Ok, so I work in an environment with mostly older people. About 6 months ago, a guy around my age (25) started in my department. We became buddies and have been e-mailing etc to relive our work boredom. Mostly jokes and poking fun at work things. Please note, I’m happily married and not at all attracted to this work friend. This is purely a work-friendship situation.
Problem: it’s been 1 month and he hasn’t accepted yet. I’m really surprised and offended by this. Nothing has changed between us at work and we still get along great. Now, I was thinking of just cancelling the request. What do you think? Should I cancel? Maybe send an email to explain? Leave it be? Thanks,E

E, who the f-ck cares. Facebook is some weird intergalactic cyberspace bullsh-t that some big nerd with zero social skills made up. So trust me when I tell you that if someone doesn’t add you as a friend it doesn’t mean sh-t.

For real.

I even have a few people on the wait list for no other reason than I’m too lazy to hit the accept button. Now, I admit that I don’t really know why he didn’t friend you, but people are always making up strange FB rules for why or why not to add someone.

Here are some examples:
If I don’t party with you on weekends
If you’re not in my phonebook
If I haven’t seen you since high-school
If you don’t send a message with the friend request
If you’re my mom
(…the list goes on)

But the number one rule I hear the most is: I don’t add people I work with.

If there’s one excuse that makes the most sense to me, it’s this one. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want is for my colleagues to see what I’m really like. So I’ll bet you that’s his reasoning. And if so, that’s legit. No biggie.

Do I think you should go to the trouble of cancelling the request? It’s neither here nor there for me. It’s not like cancelling will erase the fact that he saw it with his own eyes, but if it makes you sleep better at night – go for it. I guess what I’m saying here is just chill out. Now what I DON’T want you to do is send him an email to explain -that’s just lame and super unnecessary.

If I can hammer the point I made earlier …. social media is NOT something we should base our real life relationships on. Look, if we stop trusting our own judgment as to whether or not someone genuinely likes us, then we’ve got some serious issues.

So E, I hope I’ve put your mind at ease here.


Hi Sasha, "N" and I have been best friends for 30 years. She is a couple years older than I am, so she has always played that "I'm the boss" older sister to me which has always bothered me, but who doesn't have a sister like that?

Jump forward to last March – she has her first baby. Side note: I have decided that I no longer wish to have children. At all. End of story. She knows this.

Everything was fine during her pregnancy - I bought her tons of gifts, helped her with everything, drew, colored, matted and framed art for babies room she had even mentioned that she was thinking that she'd like me there when the baby is born... 10pm the night before he was born I got a text telling me that she was on her way to the hospital and would call me later, okay, no problem I totally understand that she had decided to make it a 'her and her husband' thing. I arrange with work the next day that I would sneak away for a few hours to go to the hospital to visit my new "nephew", and then I get a text mid-morning saying that she will call me when she gets out of the hospital... a little strange, but whatever - she's probably tired and sore. She calls the next night, all that comes out of her mouth is how "we were supposed to do this together" "you said we would have kids together so they would be friend's like us" and "you don't know what you are missing" and "you need to change your mind". So, our calls got fewer and fewer, at first because we only talked when I initiated the calls but then because I stopped initiating those calls because I was tired of hearing what I was doing wrong in my life.

She wanted me to come visit her only as she refused to drive towards my home (about a 30 minute drive) because her new bundle does not like car rides.... and I was so swamped with work that I didn't even have time to go out with my sweetie and tie one on - so going out there for the day was difficult for me. Then the summer came and I was less busy but she was busier - because although her bundle did not like car rides into the city he sure loved the car ride to their recreational property in the states (WTF!!!) so she came up with a plan that she would call me on Friday if she was free on the weekend and if I wasn't busy we'd get together... Well she asked twice, both times I already had plans (not surprisingly, it was Friday after all). So last July she texts me (she doesn't call anymore at this point) saying she will be in town (my town) for a car show and wants me to come by... unfortunately I had already booked time off work to go up to the interior to spend time with my hubby who had been working up there for weeks and wasn't sure when he would be back, so I text her back with that info and she texts me back that "I really need to figure something out because we hadn't seen each other in months". Again my fault.

So (I'm almost done here) I don't talk to her again after this... at all. Still haven't...
I sent a mushy xmas card hoping for a spark, I got a picture/card back - with NOTHING written on it. Then comes babies first bday, I hadn't heard from her still so I sent a bday gift to her house with a card and so on... then I find out she is throwing him a big party - it's all over facebook, everyone is invited.... except me. So after about a dozen of our "mutual friends" (which are mostly her husbands buddy's wives) write on facebook how they are soooooo excited about this party I snap. I wrote happy birthday wishes on "N"s "wall" and deleted her. I was done; I was tired of being pushed around and now pushed away because of my choice to not have children and made to feel like I just wasn't good enough to be her friend...

She noticed I had deleted her. She blocked me. Then she told everyone that we know mutually that I called her the big "C" word (which I didn't) and that I am super jealous of her and her perfect little life, now they have all deleted me too (not really a big deal to me, as I said they are mostly her husband's buddy's wives - and, little fact : "N" HATED a few of them passionately until they became Mom's and now they are inseparable, for real!!!).

Anyway, I do not regret cutting our friendship off, I know now looking back that she didn't treat me very nicely over the years and I should have cut her out a long time ago but it makes me crazy that this happened and I also hate that people think that I did some big bad thing when I didn't... unless you consider my not wanting children a big bad thing.... And I know that there should have been better communication during this war, but confronting her with stuff is like confronting a mad man with a gun... if you're going to bring it up, you had better run and hide before you get shot. HELP! Please. Anything. P.

This is *really* where facebook comes in handy. When you want to tell someone to f-ck right off all you need to do is delete and block. That’s some hard core tech ‘tude right there.

But here’s how to rationalize the unrational. There’s no denying the fact that when babies come into the mix – sh-t gets different. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally down with chatting about nap cycles and the latest in synthetic nipples, but that can’t be all the friendship is about. Obviously you give your friend/new mommy a grace period of a year to ram your ears with sh-t you know nothing about, but after that time has passed the friendship should find its way back to equal footing.

Of course it doesn’t always pan out that way…

There are a lot of moms out there who want to haze and shame their friends for not procreating. Which. Like. F-ck. You. They’re like one blue bandana away from being a Crip if you don’t want to be part of their gang. It’s straight up insulting and annoying.

Now, let me back up my anger here for a second because I can’t place all the blame on your friend. I think it’s all lovely and nice that you showered her with gifts and stuff, but do I think you could have cancelled one of your other plans to see the kid? YES, I do. EVERYTHING changes when someone has a kid – any and all social events revolve around when the kid eats, sleeps and sh-ts.

A general rule that works for me is: treat your new mommy friend like a paraplegic. Do whatever they need and want – so if they need you to wipe their ass because they’re too tired, well, where’s the f-cking toilet paper. You know?

Now having said all of this P, I do think your friend acted bizarrely. Post-partum, sleepless nights, just plain ol’ bitch - who knows - but what is clear is that she dropped the communication ball. She was passive-aggressive, judgmental, and yah, not that great of a friend. So, peace out.

It’s unfortunate things spiraled out of control the way it did, and if I’m being really honest here, there seems to be way too much damage done. And there’s no sugar coating it – this is going to take a while for you to get over. You’ll continue to be pissed, confused, hurt and betrayed for a while. I know it’s annoying to say, but only time is going to make this one better.

I hope this helps! Xx