Online Relationships

Every day, I’m amazed at how relationships can develop without even meeting a person face-to-face. The Internet has given us a new way to connect with people, and while some may disagree, I think that you can make just as deep of a connection online as you can in real life. Not that online connections aren’t “real,” but for the sake of this post, let’s use the phrase “in real life” to mean in your daily face-to-face life, away from the computer.

I have many online friends who I’ve never met that are more important to me than friends that are in real life. I’ve met multiple boyfriends and dates online and am currently dating someone who I would have never met had an online site not brought us together. I started a website with someone I’d never met in real life, to much success. I consider the advice of many of my online co-workers to be better than most of the advice of my real life peers.

Yet, online relationships are strange. A friend (online friend, I may add) of mine recently commented how easy it is to forget that someone exists if they suddenly aren’t online anymore. Well, maybe that’s not really fair. It isn’t necessarily about not caring. If one of your online friends just sudden isn’t online anymore, you may not have a way to contact them on hand. Sure, you might be able to hunt them down through search engines if you’re good at putting pieces of a puzzle together, but when push comes to shove, few people actually go to the trouble.

Image: sxc.hu

If you’ve spent any time online at all, I’m sure it has happened to you. A client, though he/she may have paid, no longer sends you work or responds to emails…or someone who was very vocal stops commenting on your blog…or a friend that once stayed up every night chatting with your doesn’t log online anymore…or one of the most popular posters on a forum you enjoy doesn’t post anymore…or a love interest on an online dating site doesn’t reply to your messages anymore…

I could go on and on. People online just…disappear.

Recently, someone I respected very much disappeared from a forum where we both belong. She was a co-worker (we both wrote for the same content provider), and the forum was exclusively for writers at this company. There are only around 20 active members, so we all know one another better than most co-workers at online companies. We all knew she was having major health problems, so were worried when we hadn’t heard from her in quite a few weeks.

After some investigating, one of the other writers who knew her better than I found her obituary. Right now, I feel crushed. I didn’t know her very well, certainly not as well as some of the other writers that had been around longer than I, but she was someone I really enjoyed and respected. We all knew that she was battling cancer, but I guess no one wanted to admit that she wouldn’t pull through.

The point of this post isn’t to make you sad, though I won’t hold it against you if you get a bit teary-eyed, because I certainly am while writing this. I just want to encourage you all to take your online relationships to the next level. You may never meet offline, and there’s something to be said for online safety. However, when you make a deep connection with someone online, consider sharing some offline information as well. If either of you disappear, for whatever reason, that extra effort will mean that you can still keep in touch. Or at least find out what happened.