What is a friend?

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(This is kinda rambling. But it’s randomly been on my mind for quite some time.)

What is a friend? Everyone has her own description, I suppose.
^{In lieu of saying 'him/her' each time, I'm going to use 'her' more often. Hope you don't mind.}

One person might define a friend as someone who she can confide her deepest secrets to, someone who will help her at the drop of a hat.

She wants to go to a movie but doesn’t want to go alone? She calls her friend.

She feels like guzzling a bottle of wine and sobbing about her troubles and burping the alphabet with someone who won’t count down the seconds until escape? Her friend pops over with an extra bottle, a pizza, and a box of donut holes. Just in case.

This is the
I’ll jump in front of a band of rabid chimpanzees to spare your life
type of friend.

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But that’s just one person. Another person might define a friend as someone who, when waved at on the street or at work, responds in kind. Every now and then a friendly chat might pop up, and both find the other easy to get along with; but there’s not much interaction outside of that.

This is the
You’re an awesome person, but I’m never going to remember your birthday unless it’s on Facebook
type of friend.

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And of course, the spectrum of ‘in between’ is endless and endlessly personal.

But what about internet friends? How much of a friend can you be with someone whom you’ve never met, nor are likely to ever meet? I guess there’s a level of trust when interacting with anybody, be it in person or online.

It seems to me, however, that the set of “trust parameters” is entirely different in regards to purely online relationships. Namely, you have to trust that the person you’re speaking with actually is who she says she is.

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Because the truth is, you just don’t know.

It’s immensely easier to judge a person’s character when seeing and interacting with them in the flesh.

Granted, you might meet a person who is warm, inviting, active in his community, and loves kids, even to the point of dressing up as a clown to do their parties… only to later discover that person was John Wayne Gacy, the (now) infamous serial killer.

Okay, but besides sociopaths and psycho killers, you can get a pretty good indication of a person’s true nature by physically spending time with them.

Online, however, you might be chatting back and forth for months, even years, only to discover that said person is absolutely not who she said she was, or who has circumstances completely different than what she let on. In extreme cases, she might not even be a she after all.

In fact, this concealing of information in online relationships even has a name, that I’m sure most of you know.
Catfishing.
^{(If anyone could tell me *why* it’s called catfishing, I’d be very grateful. Besides the whole ‘bottom-feeder’ metaphor, I don’t get it. At all.)}

It’s happened to me. It’s happened to most of us. It’s the nature of the beast, I suppose.

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But say you’ve actually met a friend, or even a community of friends. (We’ll keep this at one friend for simplicity.) You’ve talked back and forth with this person for months. Nothing romantic, just what feels like a stable friendship based on mutual trust and respect.

And then she signs off and doesn’t sign back on.

For days.

Then weeks.

Nothing.

No one’s heard from her and all her accounts (the ones you know of, anyway) are silent.

Now, if you had known this person in real life, you might know where she works, where she hangs out. You might be able to contact other people who see her on a regular basis, to trade information and ask questions. Worst case scenario, you could even see on your local news if something terrible had happened to her.

But you didn’t know her in real life.

And as her absence weighs on you more and more, you come to realize you didn’t even know her real name or what city she lived in.

Or, maybe you knew her first name and her city, but not her last name, not where in her city. You don’t know any of her IRL friends, only those online, who are just as in the dark as you are.

She’s just gone.

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And you start to wonder, was she truly a friend?

Are IRL friends and online friends fundamentally different somehow, or even less significant in our lives?

Of course you’ll mourn her just as you would anyone of any importance who disappears from your life. But, in some way, is the loss a bit less impactful simply because she was never a physical presence to begin with?

How much can you mourn someone you’ve never seen face to face, shaken hands with, hugged, noticed the unique quirks and nuances that come with spending time alongside her?

I’ve wondered this for a while now,
after just such an incident happened to me.

I had developed what I thought was a great friendship with someone. We chatted online and on the phone, and had even discussed meeting up sometime (of course, as most internet interactions happen, we were many miles apart).

This went on for a few months, and then he vanished. Just like the example above. Gone.

It upset me quite a bit in the beginning.

I worried about him, and was really annoyed that there was absolutely nothing I could do to discover what had happened.

I just had to let it go.

In “real life,” I’m the type of person who has one, maybe two good friends, and for those friends I would do anything. Jump in front of a band of rabid chimpanzees.

Anything.

So when this happened, it messed with my brain in ways I’d never before considered.

Essentially, I just had to sit back and blindly accept that this person was no longer in my life.

Poof.
Just like that.

No questions. No closure.

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I would never do that to someone I knew physically. No way. I'm just not built that way.

But eventually I got to the point where I just thought, Oh well, I only knew him online.

So was he truly a friend?

He was more than an acquaintance, for sure. More than someone I just had a passing interest in. I can’t say I’d remember his birthday, but then again, I never knew his birthday in the first place!
What kind of friend is that?

An online friend, perhaps.

I’m of a generation that grew up without the internet.
^{(Full disclosure, I’m 37. So the big internet machine really got going when I was about fifteen or sixteen.)}

Maybe that has something to do with my difficulty in grasping the concept of IRL friends versus online friends.

I’m curious to know other people’s feelings, especially those who’ve grown up with the internet. What are your thoughts about all this? Do you feel differently toward people you interact with online (especially on sites like Steemit where friendships can become quite close) as opposed to people you physically meet?

Thanks for reading my ramble!

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