With a Little Help From My Friends…
Jenera wrote something last week on her blog that I felt the need to write about. She said:
“In my couple years of blogging I have managed to meet some great people. I have made friends and though I have not met any of them in person, I feel close enough to them to call them friends.
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Some make fun of those of us who have online friends. I think they are jealous. One friend is states away and one is countries away. Yet I know that if I ever had the opportunity to meet up with them in real life, it’d be like we were friends forever.”
People who haven’t made friends online just plain don’t understand the depth of connection you can have with someone who isn’t right there next to you. But, as I mention to Jenera, as someone who has social anxiety, online connections have been wonderful to me.
Many people argue that we’re only becoming friends with words on a screen, but just like we are more than our bodies, the words are more than words. The words convey meanings. Put together in certain ways, words mean certain things. But beyond that, the words also carry feelings.
That’s called empathy.
Have you ever read an email and thought, “I wonder what’s wrong with him/her? S/he sounds sad.” If words were just words, you wouldn’t possibly be able to derive that sort of conclusion unless the person had written “I am sad” or something similar.
I would be lost without my online friends, and I wouldn’t be here today if not for my husband (who I instantly connected to ‘just’ through words online). In fact, the people I know online have supported me ten times more than the friends I had growing up.
So if anyone ever tries to tell you that you can’t have that kind of connection online? You can tell them that you know at least one very happily married couple who met online.
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