Dear Tell All: I recently started to make friends with a new coworker. We're both straight, married women in our thirties, and although she has kids and I don't, we just seemed to hit it off. I Googled her to find out if she had a Facebook page, and she didn't seem to, but she had a Pinterest, so I looked at her boards.
I found that she liked a lot of clothes that I hated and wants to redo her kitchen in a way that I, well, would not want to ever redo mine. Let's not get started on her musical taste.
I know these are small things, but the bloom is maybe off the rose for me as far as our budding friendship goes. The thing is, are those Pinterest boards just giving me advance warning of a general difference of taste that I would have eventually discovered anyway, or should I just forget I ever saw that ugly granite countertop and keep hanging out with her?
- IHateGranite
Dear IHG: Call me old-fashioned, but I don't believe in judging people by their social-media habits. If I did, I'd never make any new friends, and I'd surely get rid of all my old ones. Have you ever noticed that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have a way of making even smart, sophisticated people look like idiots? I bet even Abraham Lincoln would seem less than Rushmore-worthy if he started posting photos of himself ("new beard, lol!") and liking Civil War generals' fan pages.
We all know that, in real life, our friends have more substance, charm and wit than they seem to on social media. Online, people aren't exactly people - they're personas. And a lot of perfectly wonderful folks just aren't so good at managing their social-media "characters."
So I beg you, IHateGranite, don't reduce your new coworker to a mere lover of granite countertops. When Pinterest threatens to come between you and a potential friend, it's time to log off.
