social networking etiquette

i'm not very good at the social networking thing, let's be honest here. so i have a scenario that i don't know what to do with:

say you have a "friend" on one of these sites. it's someone you met once - maybe twice - and you knew the crazy was there because you could just feel it, but you never thought you'd be the recipient of the crazy, so you went ahead and added them in total innocence. flash forward a bit and you find you ARE the recipient a little of the crazy.
you can't delete them as a friend because the crazy will become worse - you just don't have to see it as much, although the internet is kind of a good crazy buffer. the comments come, but you can't delete the comments (even though you REALLY want to) because they get the emails for when the comments are responded to and when they don't get any, they know you deleted them and then we have the same crazy situation as above.

i want to get rid of the crazy because i don't like how fragile it feels - i'm too much of a bull in a china shop for this kind of crazy - but how do you do it without being obvious and then hurting feelings and then possibly getting cut by a crazy the next time you see them in person??

THIS is why i don't dig the social networking.

any suggestions?