Virtually Friends

I suspect I was born in the wrong era. These postmodern virtual relationships that everyone is having make me feel on edge. The other day I was talking to an old friend about her newly acquired best friend. She was raving on about how lovely and incredible and gorgeous he is. When I asked her where they met, and she responded that she hadn’t met him yet, I was lost for words. To have so much trust in a virtual person to label them as your best friend sounds like hell in a handbasket to me, yet it is happening all over the globe in this day and age.

I believe that friendship is wonderful and although it does require time, effort and maintenance, good friends will always return support, trust and love to you. We all know that having some good friends who you can call upon when things are down, or when you’ve achieved something, is always beneficial to leading a healthy and happy life. My question is; do these friends have to be in your real life, or can they can be purely a virtual part of your reality, in order to constitute a genuine, healthy friendship?

“The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense” –Ray Kurzweil 

I used to instinctively assume that there were no virtual friendships before the internet or telephone. However while pondering this more deeply, I realised that virtual friendships go back hundreds of years. Back then, they were known as pen pals. One famous example that comes to my mind is the American chef Julia Child who wrote a fan letter to the well-known culinary editor Avis Devoto. Their friendship blossomed by letter while Julia lived in France and Avis in the United States. Avis soon became Julia’s editor and publisher, making them a famous duo in the culinary industry.  With improving technology, pen pals adopted telephones and more recently, computers to communicate. It’s obvious to me that for a long time, humans have derived a thrill from having a relationship outside of the mundane reality of their daily life. These types of relationships allow us to add and hide things from our character to represent ourselves as someone we are not, or in contrast, they can enable us to feel more comfortable revealing all to someone who doesn’t have other connections to, or investment in, our lives. With real friends, not only can they see us but it is easier to read our personalities, body language and motives, and thereby more easily ascertain things about you that you may not, in fact, want revealed. Something I have learned is that without actions someone can only trust you for your words, and we all know that actions can speak louder than words.

Hidden motives aside, there are times where virtual friendships can be valuable to certain situations. For example, I used to be very shy and have some social anxiety, however my parents refused to let me get social media until I was older, as much as I cried and begged for it. I know for me at the time having problems with communicating I would’ve utterly treasured a virtual friend so much more than my real life friends. I could’ve communicated with this virtual friend without feeling the constant weight and stress of feeling judged for projecting what I wanted to say. Another example I can think of is my mom’s friend, Nikki. Nikki was a mother of four, who lived in a rural property. Three of her children had various special needs. She was largely parenting alone while her husband drove trucks across the country. She met my mother thirteen years ago when they both joined an online parenting forum. The friendships that developed through the forum provided Nikki with a lifeline through those lonely years, and helped her find the courage to leave her abusive husband and alter her circumstances.

Although a virtual friend is perfectly wonderful for some scenarios, there are many risks. A virtual friend, although they aren’t there with you in person, can be very often there for you online. We can all see that people these days spend masses of time online. Can you only imagine how much time you’d spend online if you hadn’t seen your best friend for weeks, months or ever? When I went on school exchange to France, I felt so disconnected from French culture and community that I would spend hours and hours each day messaging and talking to people from home. This didn’t help me to gain the best experience possible from my exchange, as I often disconnected myself from what I could’ve been learning or experiencing, and I was spending much too much time online which made me feel sad and unhealthy. I feel upset to know that this is the depressing reality of many people’s lives in this 21st century era.

I have discovered that as a human, I have a number of skills that I use to assess how I feel about a person. Personally I find it is much harder to instinctively assess someone virtually. I believe real life friendships in this regard are much healthier, but there are certain scenarios where I think virtual friendships can be beneficial, so long as they are navigated with caution. We must realise that this issue is becoming more and more important as online relationships become increasingly embedded in contemporary daily life.