Re: Can you be friends online without ever meeting?

On 2009-12-06 09:00:56 -0500, Garry the Island Boy <garrybry@xxxxxxxxx> said:

This came up . . . I have many friends from RMGD, but I have actually
met them in RL <real life>, that was the reason for the RMGD
luncheons . . . Joe, Rupert, Walter, Sue, Tim, Mary, Scot, Katrinka,
Sweetbac <funny guy>, JC Martin, Corky, etc the list goes on. Now here
is the issue, can you call someone a friend if you have never met them
in RL, looked them in the eye, and found the real deal. Or can you
refer to someone as a friend who has just sent you some cool tunes?
Perhaps I have a higher standard of "friend" then this other person. A
friend to me is someone I would crawl over broken glass to help, who
has helped me, who I would go bankrupt to bail out of jail or fly
halfway around the world to help. Maybe it is just me . . . . Any
thoughts?

G.

Some of my friends I knew online for many years before meeting in real life... I think online friends are mostly what used to be called "pen pals" - people who write one another about various things (collections, hobbies, etc), often trading (stamps, etc) and never actually meeting except in rare cases.

In my case, I have made some friends on line whom I most definitely consider real friends, and I would help them if they needed it. But perhaps not to the same extent as, say, my friend of 27 yrs in real life. Though... some of my real life friends moved so far away that they have been pretty much pen pals until the internet - now it's the same, only online. I used to send paper photos, now we share on the computer. I haven't seen some of them in a dozen or more years... yet, we still are friends.

Most of my friends, we just kinda take up where we left off last time - no awkwardness, just happy to see one another. Just saw a real life friend last night - I haven't seen him in 2 years and damn I missed hiim! He tends to disappear and reappear for years at a time.

I don't think it's a "new" thing - just a new medium for making friends. Pen pals taken one step higher?

Sherry in Vermont


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