Your online Relationship
or an illusion of one.
Oh, you love the digital age. Being able to access anything and everything with no more effort than lifting your finger. Being able to be there for each and every one of your dear friends, girlfriends or boyfriends from the comfort of your couch. You can say good morning to your loved ones first thing in the morning, literally right after you open your eyes. Wish them a good night just before they fall asleep. Wish them happy birthday, congratulate them on any occasion, share your thoughts and feelings, tell them what's going on in your life. All this without having to organize and plan, without having to arrange sleepovers, without having to juggle calendars, without having to make your house look and feel comfortable for them, without having to leave your house, and without even having to see them once in real life.
The fresh connection feels amazing, especially when you click right away on something you're both interested in. It can be books, writing, games, or any other hobby that bonds Internet strangers into communities. You can talk all day long, perhaps sharing generally boring information about yourself that somehow feels exciting. Because it's all new to someone on the other end of the screen who is genuinely interested and - finally - wants to spend real time with you in this digital world. You get free emotion, and so much of it. You get free bonding, free excitement, your free time filled with you, them, and both of you together. You can't magically spawn your real-life friend on the train next to you on the boring ride home. But you can take that smartphone out of your pocket, open any app with messaging functionality and be right there with your online friend. In any free minute of your busy day.
For free you get someone who gets you and you get them. For free you get love and support, acceptance without complications. Sounds convenient. And pretty amazing, isn't it? Dear Digital Native, in the honeymoon phase of this new relationship, you are forgetting one very important thing. Nothing in this world is really free.
One day a question might pop into your head. Do you really know who they are? Do you really know what kind of person you are sharing a part of yourself with? What kind of sources support your information about them? Then you can finally realize - the only source that tells you about them is their own written or, less often, spoken words. The only source they have is your words. This is quite a "trust me, bro" situation, and we will not even get into the catfishing and other wild cases out there. But think about it for a moment. Do you know enough about yourself to be able to describe who you are without any visual information about your facial expressions and body language, without the tone of your voice being transmitted, without your actions and any physical communication other than, well, words? Are you even that good with words?
Are you able to figure out the person on the other end of that connection without being able to see or hear them in real life? To understand their world? To picture the incoming information as it is without projecting anything of your own judgment, understanding, or emotion into it? Oh, you are so guilty of projecting, aren't you? The person you're being told about is just a shadow of the narrator mixed with your own image of that narrator. You see texts about them, pictures of them, maybe videos of them, but not them. They simply do not exist in your reality because they are digital parts of a real person that you have interpreted or decoded on your end. You can love them, you can hate them, it does’t really matter because this person you are imagining probably has little in common with the real one and does not exist in reality.
Remember the free part? Turns out you always have to pay to have a real connection. So all your emotional rollercoaster leaves you with the void of a person you don't know but are attached to. A strange position that requires a decision. Either make sense of it or drop it, and learn - or not learn - this simple lesson: first sow, then reap. You cannot cash out returns without investing, or you will end up in debt. You'll end up in the unfortunate situation of not really knowing who you're dealing with, but having your heart poured into them. What can this barely stranger do with your heart? People who don't know each other are incapable of understanding each other. People who are incapable of understanding each other are very capable of hurting each other, whether intentionally or not.
But wait a minute. Can you be a friend to someone yourself? Do you even know what it means to be someone's friend? That is a question for another story. But what does it feel like to have a friend? It feels like having someone on your side. How many sides do you have in your digital space? Well, some might argue that you can have as many as you want because digital space is not physical and therefore anything is possible. But, illusions aside, you have none. Zero sides. How can a distant friend be with you when you need a hug? And don't even start with this digital hug nonsense. What about when you are sick? When you need a hand to move your sofa from one place to another? When you just want someone to have a cup of coffee with you? True friendship as we know it is very physical and without this quality friendship will always be missing something.
If you want to share yourself with another person, you should share everything. Your tone of voice, your facial expression, the look of your eyes, your body language, everything. Otherwise it will always be a fragment of you. You should be able to communicate all this with words only, occasionally supported by voice or video messages. You can only tell who you are, showing that is not an option at all. For the information you transmit to be true, you should know yourself and be honest with yourself. When you know yourself, you should share yourself without any distortion, so that the person will be able to access both your good and bad sides, no matter how tempting it may be to hide some ugly aspects to gain an advantage.
But seriously, who has the time and overthinking superpower to do all that? Your online friendship will probably always be a snippet, a piece of a real friendship, and never the whole thing. Words repeated over and over again lose their original meaning. Words will never be as powerful as timely action. Words can do very little where action is needed. And action is not possible where there are only words to be used. Any occasion when your friend is unable to be physically present for you, or you for them, will only reinforce the inferiority of such communication. Therefore, further diminish the importance of written words. They will simply lose their meaning even where they once carried it.
Yet you have nothing but words. There are no new words to be invented with the power to describe what a friend you would be if you could be there physically. So everything becomes routine, the meaning and importance of which is constantly being questioned. So communication itself is questioned, which in order to survive always needs some kind of test, proof and confirmation of it's value. In other, real-life circumstances, a worried look from a person, a put-away phone, or a simple invitation to lunch is such a confirmation. And when your friend is offline, there's no way to know what's going on with them. You can't visit, hear the intonation, see the expression. You can't understand what you did wrong without having to communicate it verbally. It's exhausting. And that kind of relationship eventually starts to feel like a job.
And can you really talk to them when they're barely online? Can you call those messages smeared across the canvas of the day a real conversation? We all know it's good when a person doesn't use their phone too much. We love it when people's real lives are so full and interesting that they don't need to go online. You would probably love to have that life for yourself, too. So is there any point in telling each other that you miss each other if you're not going to talk to each other for N hours after that sentence and just go on with your lives? And what's the point of waiting for a follow-up if your message will just go unread for the same N hours? It's not even funny if you think about it too long.
It's either chilling on your phone all the time, or feeling abandoned when the last string that keeps that connection alive is put on hold. In the end, your online friend will always be the one you feel most comfortable to put on hold. You're not going to hang up on the real one who's calling. You're not going to ask the person in front of you to wait. It is always "put your phone down" in the manifesto of how to live your life the right way. So we - online friends - are destined to become second-rate friends, a side connection and the most disposable one. We have always been part of the screen time problem, and reducing time with us will always be part of the solution.
It is hard to ghost someone in real life if they are in common with your relatives and have common friends or places of interest. You can ghost, remove, or purge someone online with the hassle of clicking a button or two. What else can you do with online connections? You can hide anything and everything from them, you can present any version of yourself that can be as far from reality as you want. You can catfish them, scam them, use them and drain them even physically by constantly dragging them through your emotional hell. You can forget them and remember them when you want to dump something that is happening in your life on them. You can also treat them like a real human being or you can choose not to, it’s all up to you and no one will probably find out if you do something not so decent to that ghost of a person in your phone. After all, no one in your life really knows these online people, and you hardly really know them yourself.
The sad thing is that all these people are real humans, including you. Glued to their phones, chasing a promise of free happiness that they will have to pay for later. Pay with their time, their care, their concern. Pay by taking that time away from other people around them. Pay to maybe one day find some satisfaction in it, if the communication is honest and done with enough of the right effort. But you don't know the formula that will get you there. And if this online relationship is all you've got.. Well, it kind of sucks to be you.