Are online-only friendships of value to you?

[clickprincess]

I moved to where I live now almost six years ago.  During these six years, I have become friends with a few people but none that I would call a close friendship.  I have several online friendships where I haven't physically met the person but I feel closer to some of these online friends than to any of my offline friends.

There are two people, in particular, who I generally "speak" to on a daily basis.  We haven't met face-to-face but I consider them both to be fairly close friends of mine.  When these online friends are ill, I feel for them and when they are having issues, I worry about them. I would miss both of them greatly if they should suddenly disappear offline.

I would love to be able to meet them in person some day but they are quite a distance from me - one will actually not even be in this country soon so I quite possibly will never have the chance to physically meet her.

My roommate refers to my friends as "computer people" like they are not quite real.  To me they are every bit as real as my neighbors and just as valuable as friends whether we meet or not.  What do you think of online friendships?

[Britlady]

Online friendships are very important to me. I've been trying to get back to this thread for a while but as you know things are crazy right now so I'm sorry about that.

I've had online friendships that have seen me through good and bad. Over a period of eight years in fact and some of the earliest friends I made online are still a part of my life now. In fact there's a friend I made some six years ago that I am meeting physically on March 4th-I have my train tickets already bought and I didn't even wait to get into the country yet!!

There are special considerations when it comes to online friendships though. I've become close to a small number of people and come to care about others. Like you I worry when people don't come online at the 'normal' time, and when they are missing for a day or two. But mostly I worry because it did happen-twice in fact-I lost an online friend.

Once was because his sister died. She was just eight years old and was caught in a car wreck, their car being side swiped. She lived a day or two longer but Robbie was just destroyed. He was older than her at 16, and just doted on his little sister. He came back just twice-once to tell us of what happened, and a second time to say that she had died and that he would not be coming back. There was a member in his town who later told us of how shocked the small town was.

Well our whole community was rocked-but not as much as when a member themselves died. The guy was just forty three and he just disappeared. A week later someone claiming to be his son came to our community and posted that he had died of a heart attack very suddenly. Thanks to the wonder that is the internet we were able to track down info in his town-obits and so on, and found that it was sadly true. I've kept in touch with the son for two years.

Other times people have disappeared and so I've found myself scouring the obits for the area that I knew them to be from. This is getting to be maudlin so I'll stop but I just wanted to kind of outline the past happenings and say that yes-I know what you mean. My online friends are just as real to me as the people I have to tolerate in my daily life-more so in fact because I choose to associate with them instead of having to suffer them.

But till a person experiences an online friendship they can never understand. You'll never convince someone who hasn't been a part of it, and my own parents are the same.

Wow, nice ramble there I guess I'm a bit tired tonight lol!

P.S I have just one more thing to add. If you have online friends-make sure that someone in your physical life knows where your communities are. Its hard on people to not know-so I've made sure that there are people who know of a person to contact in case of emergency. It only takes one designated online contact in some cases to get the word out but it could make a lot of difference to the people who are used to your presence at particular times.