I don't know, I may be jumping the gun, but I'm already suspecting.

She is a good friend from college days and I don't have many who go that far back. In the past few years she has gotten really over-the-top into fitness. Anyway she's overseas and I really do like her and so I keep up the Facebook relationship despite her littering my newsfeed with easily twenty posts a day, most of which are links to fitness sites, pics of extremely muscle-y women, inspiration quotes, recipes, etc etc. Her take (because other acquaintances have responded negatively) is that you don't have to look if you don't want to. But it's in my face--I'm not even clicking on these links most of the time.

She is a nice person and very non-judgmental, but what I complained about to her was the sort of thing she passes along. In the fitness community, based on what she's posted, I see a huge amount of arrogance and superiority. One pic was of a guy working out in the gym (he clearly had no idea the pic was being taken of him). The caption for the post was mocking him for working on his upper body but neglecting his "chicken legs." There were tons of FB comments substantiating this. I protested it and got a response from one guy: "Too bad. NO MERCY." Ugh. One other thing my friend posted was a pic of a pretty young woman and the critique of her was that she shouldn't be holding those shopping bags, instead of shopping she should be working out to fix her non-existent butt. (Yeah, YLF-ers would be down with this So yes, incredible arrogance, no?

So friend has drunk the fitness kool-aid and is often posting pics of women bodybuilders. Anyone who makes any sort of comment (such as "I liked how she looked before better") is deemed a "hater." I said that the term "hater" was being used indiscriminately and in an over-the-top way. Not to mention it demonstrating a victim-y attitude considering the examples of snarkiness I had seen from that community.

What I regret and worry about is not the criticisms I broached to my friend, but the fact that I didn't PM her on Facebook, and said these things openly on her page. I also made sure to state that L. herself does not engage in these attitudes, but that by passing them along she is at least showing that she is unaware of aspects that are offensive to me and many others. I suppose I wanted people to know how I felt, and because I was (maybe not clearly enough) disassociating her good qualities from the arrogance of these other people, I thought I was aiming my complaints at them and not at her, but rather pointing out to her what she is surrounding herself with. But she is likely to take it personally. I fear.

Friendships, however strong, are so easily broken up these days, especially when the connection is electronic. I know L. is a good-hearted and generous person but I fear I should have been like everyone else and "just not say anything if you have nothing nice to say."

So I will be avoiding Facebook for a bunch of hours today, which is just as well. But man, my penchant for honesty sometimes....It is past the point where I could delete the post and resend it to her as a message in hopes that she didn't see it on her wall, because she is on FB all the time.