Refusing a friend request

Re: the men vs women requesting friendship...this. ^^

Friendship brings out the very worst in people here.I always remember being really nice to this woman I met who was in charge of a gallery and who worked at a university (I shoulda had warning bells ringing when I learned that). Anyway, I friended her and she accepted. Then when I left she defriended me about ten minutes later and when I asked her, she said, she didnt have time for people like me as a friend and only kept a handful of close "personal associates". Cheeky b***h.

And she wasnt young - she was one of those "vaguely 45s-55s" who hate peopel liek me.

I accept people as friends and keep them as much as I can. Who knows when you are gonna need someone - anyone - to help you out.

I thought you were talking about me for a moment there. Especially when I noticed the parenthetical postscript. Is it catching?

Pep (As well as the desired ones I still get lots of unwanted friendship offers - usually from illiterates.)

Older people are much ruder than younger people who still must establish themselves in society.

That's a load of rubbish!

Pep (We've just had more practice at it than you kids.)

All of ^^ that!

Your logic is impeccable. However, emotional responses to behavior aren't necessarily logical. While the popup contains a message, most people don't bother putting anything there, and more importantly, most people don't consider that as personal as normal communications -- as though it came from the system, rather than the individual.


I sometimes say, "Feel free to friend me." It's especially useful in an ambiguous setting like business, where some expect it and others abhor it. It gives the other party the option without demanding a response.

Sometimes I'll get a reply like, "Thanks, but I keep my friends list very short, and I know how to find you." Which again is nicely ambiguous and covers a wide range of possibilities (including, they think I'm a creep of whose company they'd chew their arm off to avoid enduring 10 another minutes).

Yay! got what I wanted!

Now stick that cute lil tongue out again, if you dare!

You know I cannot resist a dare, or at least not one coming from you.

Thanks, useful input. So, it's not like a handshake, eh?

/me nibbles Lil's tongue and makes a note to make a more interesting dare nextime he's ingame!

Most of the time this is true for me. I feel like I am being to forward for a lady if I make the request. Regardless of how flirty I can be, and despite how forward I can be in the bedroom, until a relationship is a bit more established, I usually prefer the guy to pursue and offering friendship falls into that category for me.

You can be forward in the bedroom?

You are absolutely right. There's this old bloke who lives nearby who constantly stares right through me even though I am super-super nice to him and then there was this bloke from Idaho (or Iowa - wherever the potatoes come from, anyway) who asked me for directions and was really snotty when I said it was too far for him to go in his old car and he shouldnt go into the bush liek that if he was on medication. Boy - eriously - he was really rude. So I thought, right mate, suit yourself. If one day teh cops find a trail of digestive biscuit crumbs leading off to nowhere at least I tried to dissuade you from going.

i've just been busy running around,looking at everything.i'd like to make a few friends too.

lol,why does it say at the top the last time i visited was 1969? how funny!!

Lol. A handshake is.. well.. a handshake, or a hug. It's a lot like what Lil said in that it's more of a concern about how it may look or be perceived, and it's probably rooted somewhere in the "tradishional" sense of it all. Even if I really like someone, and would want to be friends with them (speaking mostly of guys here), I'm not going to risk throwing out that offer which is commonly mistaken by the more tradishional minded as being "desperate" or "lonely". Of all the supposedly "bad" social labels I basically am in SL, those 2 I'm not lol. I also find that waiting for that request is a decent way of seperating the secure, confident types from the super timid ones who sit on their hands.. but that's purely a self-serving personal preferrence on that one.



Hi Veronica, welcome
It usually defaults to 1969 when it has no previously recorded date to display. Your first time viewing here while logged in perhaps?

*ponders* Out of the blue friend invites get simply ignored/declined.

If the person has spoken to me just once and it doesn't seem like I'll be talking to them again, I'm usually honest about reject the friend invite. "I'm sorry, I'm trying to keep my friend list to a manageable level for a scatter wit like me. When we speak again, I will gladly accept your friend invite."

The ones that offer friend invites while begging for L$ because a friend invite will "oh so prove they are good for it," get muted and declined.

Basically, my friends list is for.. my friends.

I should have said "hangover" rather than "hangup", but yeah, Victorian, medieval, or older. When you learned it, it was just a hangover that had been accepted as etiquette for so long that people didn't question the fact that it no longer had any objective function.

But walking streetside started because people were throwing their sewage out the windows and keeping the woman on the inside meant she was less likely to get splashed. So it became "polite" for the man to take the more-likely-to-get-splashed position. Shaking hands started as a way to show you weren't carrying weapons. But why would asking twice have started?

I could even understand it if people said they just liked it more because it was more personal. But that's not what people are saying -- they're just saying it's "polite" without any reason why it should be considered a social judgement instead of a personal preference.

At least in the physical world, we have decades or centuries of history to establish what etiquette is. Online, most etiquette is rooted in real, identifiable functions such as preserving bandwidth or privacy. But I don't see how you can claim as etiquette something that's only a few years old, doesn't have any functional purpose, and isn't accepted as a consensus.

I did say that, and I believe that people think it's more polite for exactly that reason.

It's very common, so there must be a reason, right? It's not strictly logical, so it must have more to do with presentation than content, right? You're smart; you should be able to understand this.

And while it may not be a concensus, Id wager that it's a substantial majority.

Yeah, it's silly when looked at from a logical perspective, but as I said before, people are often illogical, and often consistently so. Just add it to the long list.

Like, when you're passing someone on the freeway, they often unconsiously speed up as you pass, and then slow down when you've gone by. Silly. It used to piss me off, but then I realized I could keep being pissed off by human nature, or I could take a chill pill, be happier, and probably live longer too.

If it's for fear of what's being tossed from windows, wouldn't the more dangerous position be closer to the windows?

I still walk on the street side, as my mother taught me, and my wife still appreciates it. It offers a sense of protection from the busier side. I also open doors, and if a woman opens one for me I smile and say "thanks".

The real silly one these days happens a lot at work. People hold the door open behind them, when someone's following, even if they're not immediately behind. What makes it silly is that it's a lot easier to simply open the door in front of you than to hold one open behind you, so this exercise adds effort for everyone. I wish we'd all get over it! But, it's an expression of civility, and I'd rather be in a place where such expressions are common, even when illogical.

You did say that, but you also phrased your discussion of it as a personal preference and didn't attach social judgements to it, so your response didn't boggle me like some of the others.

So what we have, it seems, is a gap between people who assume polite = "more personal, even at the cost of inefficiency" and people who assume polite = "uses resources efficiently, including time, bandwidth, and user effort, even at the cost of personal distance." I mean, some of us like distance. My typist HATES the modern custom of businesses addressing everybody by their first names. [typist-rant] It's considered more friendly, but thank you, I am NOT your friend, I am your client and I expect to be addressed as Ms. So-and-So at least until we have developed an extended relationship.[/typist-rant]

Since we are talking about "friendship", it would be reasonable to expect more personal to be better, except that we're not talking about real friendship, are we? We're talking about a contact list that just happens to be labeled "friends" and doesn't inherently have anything to do with friendship. I'm coming from a LiveJournal background where everyone knows that "friends list" really just means "reading list" and there's no assumption of actual personal friendship. And even in Second Life, some people use it to represent actual friends and some use it as an all-purpose contact list -- and will continue to do so until SL makes calling cards more usable or introduces some better way of managing your nonfriend contacts.

Even if we look at it as actual friendship, when you first offer friendship, isn't the question "Would you be my friend?" In other words, it's not saying you are friends already, but that you'd like to be, so a greater measure of distance is appropriate. And as non-neurotypicals, my typist and I both much prefer efficiency and distance to people trying to be "personal", until we've known them for years and years and years.

I'm just running off at the mouth by now because I like analyzing things; I don't expect this to go anywhere. And I'm certainly not saying there's anything wrong with people prefering one method over another or choosing to associate with those who use their preferred method. But I do think it's wrong to slap broad social judgments on people (such as "she's rude" based on differing personal preferences.


Of SLers, or just of SLers that you hang out with? Because if there wasn't a substantial number of people who felt differently, this thread would never have been started.


Hence, why I don't understand why asking only once should garner condemnation.

As for the windows, I think it's that stuff was being thrown out into the street rather than being tipped directly over the side, plus windows had a tendency to stick out. Gross either way.

Carriage/horse splashes, I'd wager, as they rode through the muck. Also, passing marauders couldn't yank on a lady's arm.

I also wonder if a lady 'showing herself to the street' couldn't be confused with/regarded as a loose woman/streetwalker? Something a decent woman wouldn't do in other words - walk without proper escort.

This is exactly right. The custom dates from the period when most second floors overhung the sidewalk: spilling a chamberpot out of the window would actually mean dousing the person nearest the street.

There are a number of 17th and 18th-references to "fighting for the wall": men jockeying with other passing men for the coveted, and safer, position next to the wall of the buildings.

Ew. Can you imagine? Gardez loo, indeed.