How Can A Digital Friendship Possibly Measure Up?
“How does the weekend of July 15th work?”
It felt weird to book an actual plane ticket for leisure. Ever since the pandemic started, travel felt like a long-lost luxury. I would spend days in quarantine, lying on my floor and thinking of pictures of the sky taken from the window seat of a plane; the flight could have gone anywhere—BUR to OAK, LAX to SAN; hell, it could’ve just circled the tarmac like an oversized train with a wingpsan and I would have been happy. Shawn and I had been planning to meet up for years. But between “adult” work schedules and a global pandemic, the odds of finding a flight or the wherewithal to break quarantine protocols, our opportunities had been slim. But with the new year came new hope — vaccine availability became widespread, airlines released more tickets, and before long my ticket was booked.
“That weekend works!” he responded back a few hours later; I almost tripped running to grab my credit card.
Now here is where things get interesting: Shawn and I hadn’t met in the ten gay years we’ve known each other (for those wondering, the conversation rate is +2. So 8 years + 2 = 10), and the acknowledgment of that timeline was eye-opening. Not once in my childhood did I ever think that you can be friends with someone you haven’t met. Sure, penpals were a thing in grade school, but not once did I ever consider them a real friend. For all I know, “Thomas” could have been an inmate at the Van Nuys Corrections Department — or worst, a homophobe. Yet, here I was booking a ticket to meet a friend in another state, and despite the clear discrepancy of having never met in person, he remains one of the closest friends I have in my life and he isn’t even the only one.
Thanks to the Internet, I have befriended people I have yet to meet, had deep conservations with strangers I don’t care to meet, and have in-person friends whom I would rather call than text. All that said, I don’t consider myself a “friendless” person; and it isn’t to inflate my own ego to say that I have a fair amount of friends whom I would consider my family. But, there are days when the absolute loneliness sinks in and I feel like there really isn’t anyone to talk to. I placate myself by saying: “they’re probably busy,” or “they’re eating dinner,” or “they just hate you now, sorry.” Call it a symptom of the digital age — endless connections imbued with the anxiety of endless reasons to disconnect.
A double-edged sword of my own creation.
When I get into that mindset (which happens often, thank you very much depression and thank you even more to Zoloft), it’s as if these digital relationships don’t matter. It’s as if they don’t equate to the value of in-person relationships. How can a friend be your friend if you’ve never seen how they act in person? How can you relate if you’re unsure which notes they’ll hit when singing along to 4 Non Blondes in the car? How can you possibly consider them close if you’re unsure how tall they are? How can they catch you when you fall when they aren’t “actually there” to begin with?
These questions fly around in my head for the entire two and a half hour flight . Is it weird that we haven’t met? Am I the only one who perceives it to be weird? What if we actually hate each other in person and I wasted a whole gay decade of my life talking to someone who is actually awful (Shawn, you’re not, I’m just trying to make a point)?
It’s that perpetual dread that plagues me when I examine these friendships too closely for too long. It’s as if I’m looking for reasons to disprove their friendship; looking for a reason as to why they wouldn’t want to be my friend; looking for reasons to prove the archaically false statement that “online friends aren’t real friends.” And despite what I feel and what I tell myself, I know that it’s a falshood. I know that it’s been debunked and disproven and dismissed from the zeitgeist of social constructs. I know my friends are actually there for me. They’ve told me so and have proven time and time again that they always will be. And being well into adulthood (a fact that I will soon have to retire from verbalizing because it’s constant reaffirmation is bordering on gauche), most of my friends, even the ones I made in person, have followed their lives to the farthest flung cities across the world. If THOSE friendships have always been valid for me, why not THESE friendships?
The validity of friendships isn’t embedded in how they’ve started—virtual or otherwise—but in the effort to foster and sustain them.
The doubts vanished as the plane landed. I exit the airport and I see Shawn’s car turning the corner at the terminal; I feel excited. We scream and launch ourselves into a long hug. The moment finally met and the questions finally answered: I am not alone.
