Published in Relationships     0 comments – join the discussion!

There is an interesting phenomenon that is occurring on the Internet today. Millions of people from all over the world ‘talk’ to each other through various internet media such as Facebook, Instant Messenger, online dating sites, blogs, etc. They spend hours emailing, posting, discussing, talking and communicating with each other over the ‘wide world web’. In a world where everything is at our fingertips, it seems that friendships are as well. But how real are these friendships?

In most cases, we don’t know what these friends look like, who they are, or even if they actually are who they say they are. They could be lying about what they do, what they look like and what their intentions are. Yet, we have hundreds of people marked in our database as ‘friends’. It seems we spend an increasing amount of time online communicating over the Internet rather than outside in the real world talking to real people. We live in a world where we have hundreds of people in our address book but how many of them can we truly consider a friend?

Some people actually follow up their friendships by meeting in person and forming a tangible human bond. However, for most people, the convenience of being able to talk with someone from anywhere around the world, means that we will not be able to see them in person. True, there are web cams but it’s never the same as seeing someone face to face.

It’s the intimacy with people that we crave; yet we don’t put in much effort to make a true friendship real. We allow people to get close to us but ‘not too close’, and run the risk of having all these so called online friends yet still feeling very lonely inside.

Personally, I think if all of your ‘friendships’ are online buddies with no other form of communication (such as talking on the telephone or talking offline), then perhaps its time to start making some new friends and get out more often. Talking online is great, but nothing beats having a drink and a good laugh with a person sitting right in front of you.

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