A few days ago, JCPROBABLY wrote this post about finding and maintaining friendships as an adult. I found this blog post amazing and very insightful. It also made me think about the status of my own friendships.

The truth is, in the real world (i.e. outside the internet) I don’t have many friends. I work from home, I don’t get out that much, and I’ve always been reticent about actually talking to people. So, I’ve never been great at making friends, even when I was younger and around more people. As I get older, I get even less interested in interacting with new people. Part of that is just general apathy about people and relationships caused by decades of being a loner. Even when I do have to socialize with people for work or whatever, I’m more interested in when I can stop doing that than actually making new connections.

The post also made me think about the friends I do have. It made me realize that the vast majority of them are all “online” friends. Most of whom, I’ve never actually met in real life. The question about “online” friendships is if they actually count as friendships.

I’ve thought about this a lot, and it’s just made me think about what friendship really means. If friends are only friends if they are with you, then no, online friendships don’t really count. If that’s not the case, then I don’t see why an online friendship can’t be just as deep and meaningful as one that is in the “real world”. Online friends can have most of the experiences that traditional friendships can have. And it opens up the ability to be more diverse in your circle, which in turn allows you to expand your exposure to new ideas, experiences, and cultures.

Sounds woke, or whatever the RWNJs would say, but really, how else are you going to make a friend with someone who lives on the otherside of the world? I know I’ve met people online who have a completely different type of life than me, and their experiences have allowed me to grow as a person. Who cares that I’ve never met these people in person? I’m not going to ask them come ask me to move or ask them to lend me money. Maybe that’s the difference. If so, it doesn’t bother me.

I do think that online friendships are harder to maintain. For one thing, it takes more effort to actually learn about someone. When you meet in person, you’re more likely to be more open about personal details than you would with someone online. And that lack of intimate knowledge about each other, makes it much easier to walk away from a friendship. Online relationsips take more effort, and often these friendships never reach the heights they could in the real world. I may be online all the time, but most of my online friends aren’t. And that means that your interactions sometimes feel random. And it’s harder to know if the people you consider friends think the same way about you. This is true in real life as well, but you can more easily determine a friend’s interest in the relationship when you meet in the real world. Online friendships are harder to gauge.

So, I have mostly online friends, and that leads to some uncertainty about the true depths of my friendships. Luckily, I have several friends that I’ve known for decades, so there’s depth there. Others are newer and more fragile, but I have hope for those too. You have to have two people willing to put in the effort, though. If the other person just sees you as “someone online that they talk to every once in awhile,” then you’ll eventually have to face the fact that the friendship was one sided and probably meant more to you than to them. This happens more online, which is unfortunate and can be depressing when your friendships are mostly of the online variety.

For those of us who live primarily online, these types of friendships are important, but they also cause some distress. Because there is still value in having friends outside of the internet, and as JCPROBABLY says, it’s hard to make friends as an adult. Especially when you were never good at making friends in the first place.

This is day 21 of Blaugust 2025.