I realized the other day that I had been quietly unfriended on Facebook and I could not help but think how much better things were 50 years ago, when a relationship went south and you knew why.

Let me give you an example of how the people in my family unfriended someone when I was growing up in the Catskills: It is summer and my favorite city cousin, whom we shall call Ravishing Rachel because of the delicacy of the situation, is in the mountains with a boyfriend. My mother gets a call that one of her brothers, Rachel’s father, has had a fatal heart attack. She is naturally distraught and, after calling a few motels, finally tracks down her niece and breaks it to her.

“Ravishing, you tramp!” I hear her holler. “Your father is dead and you killed him.”

See how much better that was than Facebook? No confusion, no wondering why or when it happened. Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking: My mother was obviously the Emily Post of the Catskills, how many of us could hope to attain her command of language, her diplomacy and tact? It is amazing, you are thinking, that Jackie Kennedy didn’t ditch Letitia Baldrige and hire my mother to be her social secretary at the White House. And I would have to give you that. In my mother, one found a moral clarity that I think can only be compared to John Wayne, who unfriended people by shooting them dead.

Consider the grace with which my mother unfriended Cousin Marvin when he appeared on a summer day at our house:

“Marvin, I plain can’t stand you and nobody in the family can stand you. Stay at a motel.”

But why stop with my mother’s generation?