being nice in a virtual world

it's a long and complicated story, so the very short version is that i have an online friends' list but that unlike many others, my aim is not to have a very long one but to have one that reflects the people i hang out with and like (this doesn't mean they're all really good friends or anything). so i regularly update it by deleting people i haven't seen in months, or who haven't bothered replying to me for a while. and so i deleted this girl, who had a habit of saying she would show up to a party or whatever and not actually show up, or show up hours later without explanation. it got on my nerves so i took her off my list and sent her an email to explain, although admittedly, i didn't say i was pissed off with her - i just said i hadn't seen her in months and i wanted to keep my list up-to-date.

last night, i saw the girl in question. i was actually happy to see her, cos it had been about 6 months, and while we were never really good friends, i wanted to know how she was doing. but within minutes she asked me was i was being nice to her. i asked her why i wouldn't be. she said that by taking her off my list i'd made it clear i wasn't a nice person and she couldn't see the point of me pretending to be nice. i didn't know what to say. i tried to explain the rationale behind what i'd done, but her retort was that a nice person would have sent her an email to ask how she was doing, not to inform her she was no longer wanted.

i saw her point and thought maybe i should have explained the whole situation in the email instead, because she'd obviously really taken it to heart. but on the other hand, she couldn't possibly believe that all the people on her list were actually real friends. i would understand it in a normal situation, where you have really good friends, etc. but here we're talking about a loose network of people who randomly meet, that you know more or less not very well, although sometimes some of them become friends, and even good ones. but let's face it, in the days we were on each other's lists, she kept adding people she'd barely met once and she even told me she'd added people she'd never really seen, simply because they'd chatted online and the person had asked her to add them to her network! as far as i was concerned, she was taking this too seriously.

there are other people i've taken off my list, some people i haven't even added, despite their various hints and comments, but i'm still cordial. i don't go around ignoring them just because of that. i say hello, talk a bit, find out how they are. so that's what i had wanted to do with her too, especially as it had been so long since i'd last seen her. but i guess i wasn't to be.