If Facebook was my significant other I would have dumped him long ago.  For just like a boyfriend in an unhappy relationship, Facebook seems to be having more fun with everyone else, it is a massive waste of my time and just generally makes me feel shit.

Waking up, bleary eyed the first thing I do in the morning is check my phone for any messages or emails (read: check if anyone has liked my most recent instagram pic) and failing that I will have a quick scroll through Facebook.  On my lunch break, waiting for the tube, stirring my bolognaise sauce, sitting on the toilet, during the ad breaks, during the TV program, whilst my computer is loading, these are all times (and believe me this is no exhaustive list) when I will have a cheeky peruse of Facebook.  And, nine times out of ten I will exit the app in a fit of anger.  Yet for some reason, like a desperate lover continually returning to her abusive partner, the next time I have a second to kill my index finger returns ad nauseum to that little blue square on my phone.

In the beginning Facebook had a purpose and we had a healthy, functional relationship.  It was a great way to share information, pictures etc., and to keep in touch with friends, past, present and across the globe.  Whilst at university it really was a functional social network keeping me abreast of social events, committee meetings and birthdays.  Facebook was also the ideal storage unit for those pseudo-friends, the ones you never actually meet with but like to check up on now and again.

Then Facebook started to lose its functionality and became more about entertainment, and this connectivity I loved became redundant.  Nowadays I keep in contact with the people I care about via other means, it might not be often, but I’ll still check in with them once in a while.

As Facebook slowly became more like  really naff version of 9gag or Buzzfeed, posts interspersed with my friends ill informed opinions on this year’s Sainsbury’s advert and articles with titles like ’21 things horses look like when they eat Mexican food’ began to clog up my feed like a steady stream of diarrhoea, with little chunk of sweet corn in the form of candy crush saga invites floating past turdish adverts convincing me that a cleverly veiled diet of anorexia was the solution to my weight loss problems.  Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if I’ve never shared, liked or participated in any of these facets, but let’s just say it’s getting old and it’s getting out of hand.

I’ve seen Facebook cause arguments between grown women about who deleted who first. I’ve seen it cause friends to fly into fits of jealous rage over their boyfriend being tagged in a photo with a miscellaneous attractive female.  I don’t care that you and friend #54 were just at Cafe Rouge in Covent Garden or that you’ve had a really shit day but won’t tell any of your concerned friends why.  Eurgh scrolling through this monotonous bilge of holiday pics and ‘it’s complicated’ relationship status’ is enough to make me burst an artery.

Like waking up next to your SO and realising that after all these years you fucking detest the loudly snoring lump next to you, Facebook and I have fallen out of love.

So why don’t I just delete the son-of-a-bitch?  A pretty simple solution, right?

Many people I spoke to wouldn’t delete Facebook because for them it is still an efficient way to keep in contact with their chums en mass.  But after some thought I came to realise my own reasons were slightly more on the narcissistic side.

My anxiety about deleting Facebook stems from my fear of dropping off other peoples’ radars; less about me being in contact with people, and more about people being in contact with me.  That if I didn’t exist in this digital world, if my (hilarious) status’ ceased to crop up on peoples’ feeds, I might fall into that grey mulch in the back of peoples’ minds where friends like ‘what’s her name?’ and ‘thingy-me-bob’ reside.

Like a manipulative lover Facebook simultaneously feeds your ego and lowers your self-esteem and this is the age old conflict that keeps people coming back.  It’s a sign of the times that people invest so much of their ‘personality’ into these social media sites and I’d never categorised myself as being one of those people until I seriously thought about deleting Facebook and realised I couldn’t, or at the very least, I wasn’t ready.

So for now I’ll keep it, but I’m working towards making it more of a dormant feature in my life and less a sort of digital extension of my personality.  Stripping it of the shit and returning it to its original functionality.  Like a digital address book riddled with worms I hope only to turn to it when I really, really want or need to talk to someone because I genuinely care about them, or more likely because I want something from them (you know how it is).