I’ve been Facebook Free for three months and I’M LOVING IT! I thought it would be a lot harder to quit, but to my surprise it wasn’t hard at all. I still hear friends talking about what they saw or read on someone’s profile and I can’t help but laugh at the mindless enjoyment people can find in inane banter. Here are the 5 reasons why I left, maybe you can relate.

1. Privacy - Or the lack there-of. I don’t have much to hide. Most of my “friends know that I’m married with two kids”. But just do a little research and you’ll quickly find out what Facebook knows about you and what they share, it’s pretty frightening.

2. De-Friending – For the longest time I never knew you could hide or block the ”over sharer”. So being nauseated about the copious amounts of posts about people’s eating habits or their menu for that night, exercise regiments, pet pictures, things their kids said, feelings about their employment situation, or how mad they were at their spouse; I would just bow out being “friends” with certain people. It’s not that I don’t like the person, I just don’t need to or want to know that much about you. De-Friending came back to bite me on three different occasions, with my sister-in-law, a co-worker, and with an aunt. Now when someone asks why we are no longer friends I simply say “I’m Facebook Free”.

3. Friend Requests – I was getting friend requests from people at work and other random people. I’m sorry if this sounds bad; I really do like the people I work with and have worked with in the past. However, I already spend more waking hours with these people than I do with my wife and kids, isn’t that enough? On my time off from work I don’t want to reminded of work, if we are friends I get reminded that I get to see you every Monday morning, yay…..

Plus, some of you all are freaks! I still want to look across the room and have a semi-respectful view of you and not have that picture of you in Cabo passed out on the beach going through my head.

4. Time – We all hold something in our possession that in truly invaluable – time. Once that time is gone its gone forever. It’s not that I would spend hours on Facebook but I spent enough; time I’ll never get back.

5. My Marriage - An old flame friended me, I personally saw nothing wrong with it so I accepted the request. My wife has never had an account on Facebook so she didn’t know that I had friended this gal. I personally saw no reason to tell her, it’s not like I was hiding anything. In fact, my wife from time to time will go to my profile to see other profiles of mutual friends we share and had a good laugh. My other sister-in-law, who at the time happened to be my friend, related to my wife that I was now friends with said girl.

One night coming home from work my computer screen was on this girl’s profile. Before I could x out of the screen my wife comes into my office and asks why I would be friends with brand x. Needless to say I choose not to tell my wife if she was mad about this girl why wasn’t she mad about the other girls that I was “friends” with?

So to prove a point, with my wife in the room, I deleted my account. “There, are you happy now?” She might not have been jumping up and down with excitement but now that it’s been a while I’m jumping up and down with excitement. I’m Facebook Free!

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