The truth is, everything is a relationship. It’s always troubled me a bit that “relationship” has been co-opted to apply to long-term romantic relationships when in fact every human interaction is a relationship of some sort. We have relationships with the people we work with, family, friends, even the UPS guy who stops in every morning and drops off a few cheery words with the packages. So I thought Mike was being too technical, a year and a half or so ago, when he told me that there was nothing at risk in talking to me, that with someone he’d never met he had nothing to lose.
I could see what he meant, in a sense, but I also thought that few things are really that simple. My perspective might have been different because I already had a very close woman friend–one of the closest people in my life–whom I’d never met. That’s still true today, 6 or 8 years after we first started talking in an online writer’s group. She knows things about me few people in my day-to-day life do. So in my mind, different relationships took different shapes and there weren’t any clear rules. Still, Mike mentioned more than once that online relationships weren’t quite real.
I don’t think I ever contradicted him, but I thought about that statement the day that I mentioned in an email that I’d been up past 2 a.m. worrying over some situation with my daughter and he said, “You should have called me.” I thought about it the evening he called me from some fast food place miles from home to talk through a conflict he was about to face. But I’m not much on definitions or assigning values to things; I’m more inclined to just take them for what they are in the moment. I don’t think a relationship that takes place mostly in writing or mostly by telephone is necessarily less “real” than one that happens in the flesh–I just think it’s different. And different isn’t necessarily less.
I’m a writer, not just by trade but by inclination. That means that I express myself more naturally in writing than any other way. I also think that many discussions are much more thorough in email because digressions don’t necessarily interrupt them–the conversation can meander in one direction and then you can literally go back and pick up another aspect of it and continue down the road not previously taken. I’ve had close friends in “real life” with whom my best conversations took place via email; reading and writing works for me. I suggested once that the person who came to know me that way might know me better than someone I talked with every day, but a local friend said, “differently”, and she was right. She pointed out that my online friend didn’t know the way I looked at my child or what made me smother a giggle. And she was right.
Mike often questions whether we ever really know another person, and I suspect that we never do, completely. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know them at all, or in a way that matters. I did notice, in that forum a long, long time ago, that Mike was funny but that there was more to him than that. He’d thought things through; he knew when a serious response was required. Those things, picked up by reading hundreds of comments and responses over a period of months, held true. The profile picture was a bit misleading, though–he really doesn’t look like Woody Harrelson at all.
Online relationships can be very intense and very close. I suspect because the written word is used, rather than a speaking conversation, they could possibly be deeper. As a writer I pour my heart out to those I email and chat. In a real face to face meeting I am worrying about all kinds of things that I don’t have to think about in text. Of course it’s a double edged sword since tone of voice is so hard to translate without emoticons. Some of my best friends I have only met online, I look forward to one day meeting them in person but that won’t change the relationship or make it more worthy.