Facebook, wherein Φ triumphs at long last in the high school status competition

I first joined Facebook while a university instructor. I had read about it in the Washington Post, via a blog post (I forget whose) that characterized the site, as, well, a little creepy. It was strictly a college ghetto back then, and I was mainly interested to see how many of my students would be so foolish as to put personal information about themselves on the internet in front of God and everybody.

Quite a few, as it turned out. I was an "early adopter" among the faculty and received a few "friend requests" from my students, but there really didn't seem to be much there to keep a grownup interested.

Flash forward to last summer. A couple of old high school classmates alerted me to the fact that Facebook had since gone mainstream, and that the graduates of our small Christian high school had established a substantial network.

Facebook "friending" is very viral. By friending those initial couple of people, my name appeared on the "Walls" of all the people on their "friends list." (If you don't know what the Facebook "Wall" is, you pretty much have to join to understand it.) Anyway, I began receiving a steady stream of messages and/or friend requests that only died down close to saturation. (Like I said, it was a small school.)

High School. What can I say about it? Well, it's not like the movie, obviously, but because it was small, and Christian, it wasn't the dystopian social hell that it would have been at a public school. On the contrary, I had a great time. I found there an unprecedented (for me) level of social acceptance that would not be again matched until after I was married. And this despite the fact that my religious background (mainline Presbyterian) was different from the school's (fundamentalist).

But it was high school. Religion did indeed moderate behavior, and size kept us relatively unified as a student body, but there were still cliques, status hierarchies, and the like. Even here I should be hesitant to complain. I was an elected member of student government, for instance; I was pretty tight with a couple of the acknowledged alpha males; and I was the school's recognized "math brain". But the fact is that these don't translate into much in the way of female attention (or, to be fair, not enough to compensate for whatever other drawbacks I possessed).

How to handle all this on Facebook?

Facebook friending rules. Maybe Facebook should have called it something else, but "friend request" sounds . . . I don't know, needy maybe, or a little creepy if the recipient doesn't know or sufficiently like the sender. So to manage this psychology, I had a few simple rules (because Φ is hyperanalytical that way). First, while I would approve "friend requests" from anyone who initiated, I would try to never myself initiate a request to anyone whose high school status exceeded my own. Second, I limited my friend requests to people with whom I already had established an email correspondence. Third, I limit my friend requests to people with whom we shared no common friends, on the grounds that they know how to find me if they want me.

And, finally, I never sent a friend request to a woman. If I had something specific to communicate to her, I would send a Facebook message, but I would always leave the friending for her to initiate.

It wasn't long before, with no prior message from me, I received a friend request from one of them. One of The Clique. A certified Alpha Girl. A member of The Trio of girls with whom I associate all my feelings of being locked out of the high school dating scene (or what passed for it). A girl who, twenty-odd years later, is still really attractive

A couple of months later, the second one rolled in. Φ's social momentum starts to build.

[delusional]

Finally, last weekend, I bagged her. The queen mother of the trio. The genesis of Φ's twenty-three-year bout with misogyny. From my fortress of solitude I had waited her out! Now, in desperation, she has finally come with what remains of her fading powers to bestow the social recognition Φ deserves!

[\delusional]

Something like that, anyway.