On Social Media Conversations: Why you keep ignoring people and why you keep getting ignored.

I respect the fact that you hide your intentions in your "hi", "How are you?" and "How was your night?". But if you don’t come to me straight with what you wanted to ask or say, then our messages will forever remain in a loophole.

With me our conversations on social media will always have a head and tail. You don’t have to try and "save" it by ignoring the message till a later date. I know it’s probably your own way of expressing how you don’t want the conversation to end, so you prolong it and you end up forgetting to reply.

Conversations with me has a rhythm that dies off when you respond after a day or two. I'm not just excited as I was when I texted you. It's not up to you to save the conversation. You have to let the conversation express itself so you can truly know and see its full intentions.

Or maybe you assume that this conversation doesn’t have a domain - an ending and a beginning - so you don’t answer. You ignore because you said to yourself "if they had anything important to say, they would have said it by now instead of asking me the same questions everyday". You could be right.

But don’t forget that it takes two to have a conversation. And could it be that you were not patient enough to see the intention of the conversation, or you’ve already assumed what the intention is. This makes me think that we're trying to have conversations with people who aren't interested in having a conversation with us.

So how does this affect your view of having conversations with people on social media?

Guess who you become when you're acting like this? You must have thought about it or maybe you actually see it. But you become that guy or girl that has 100s of unread messages from people you call friends, "fam" or acquaintances.

I know. You’d never ignore a message from a friend but you did. Why? Or How? Ignoring was easier when it was done to people who you didn’t know that well, but then because of your consistency in ignoring others, it affected how you responded to those close to you, and you end up ignoring their messages too. Now you only respond via their status to things you saw that triggered you to message them. Or you only respond to them when something causes you to remember to message or respond back to them.

But it doesn't stop there. You crave to see 100s of unread messages. It inflates your ego. You even post about it on your status with a caption saying "I'll reply soon".

Because of your desire for such, you started making conscious or unconscious decisions towards creating that reality. Now You See it clearly. That you can create the type of reality you want for yourself just by the power of your thoughts huh?

I’m sure by now you can see that your actions isn’t healthy. You can also see that you can help change those actions through the power of thoughts fueled by a corresponding action. So what are you gonna do about it?

What if we could look at conversations differently, from the eyes of those who were ignored with no pride of having unread messages, and the eyes of those who were ignored but take pride in having unread messages (cos they are one and the same - humans acting differently)?

You will see that they both have the same thing in common - they feel the same way. Their ego is bruised or their feelings hurt because they know that you got the message but you chose to not respond. They wonder why someone who they held in high regard could not respond to their messages. To the ones with said pride, they could only see how other people’s actions affect them because they’re blind to how their actions affects others.

We've been at one point in our lives, either of these people. Or maybe we are now. But here's a simple advice to help you if you take pride in having unread messages: Choose to have your conversations have a beginning and an end. Choose to respond to people. Or at least respond to chats based on the degree of urgency. Pin messages of people who are important and respond to them. Have a day in a week(at least), to respond to messages you regard as unimportant. Maybe by just reading them or replying back to them.

Become self aware enough to understand that having unread messages isn't something to be proud of. Someone might have had an opportunity to share with you but you missed or was looking for a shoulder to cry on but wasn't there. Maybe they had good news, but you weren't there to hear them. Slowly and steadily, they detach from you. They don't tell you things no more. You wonder "how did we become like this?", but it might probably be too late. The thing is, when you were not there to hear those gists, there were other people that were as excited as them to hear them. The more you became unavailable, the more someone else became available.

This should tell you that sometimes, it isn’t always about you. And you can easily be replaced. To conversations that seem for a while not to have a purpose, end them yourself by saying "okay, I’ll be in touch" or "I’ll catch up with you later". Sometimes this response always brings out their intentions.

And if you're in the category of being ignored, understand that it could simply be that they were too busy not to respond on time or for people with over 1000 contacts and have 100s of messages daily, they find replying to messages tiring. It's like a job on its own. Be patient with them and understand that IT'S NOT REALLY ABOUT YOU, IT'S ABOUT THEM. This means that sometimes there's not really a good explanation to why they ignored your message or didn't respond on time. Don't take it too personal, especially if you know you're in a good place with them.

So I’m sure there are other ways you can be able to have healthy conversations with people that you can share with me via comments, but I hope this article gets you thinking of ways you could bring solutions to things you didn’t categorize as problems but they were.