Who is a friend? I made a friend on socials, then went to visit her, and the potential friendship was not natural, not evident, not easy. I came back home, and the next day I struck up a ridiculous argument in order to fracture the friendship in my head and gain some distance.
It was her compartmentalization that to me appeared as the less visible depth dimension of our friendship graph. Sure, we communicated well about feelings, about family, about reaching goals, but what it took a trip to her town to notice was that none of these insights had any tangibility. I couldn’t sit up and and say, “Hey, when your ran over a cat with your car, I was there for you, and now that we’re here in the same room you won’t even tell me your name or your address.”
In the last century, we didn’t have access to people’s inner ears as we do now, we couldn’t coo into them and conversely have them ease our pain and frustrations. Now that we do, through the power of socials, the mismatch effect is powerful, where the person to whom you’ve been cooing is not actually a person you feel comfortable spending time with. Keep this in mind for the future.
On the flip side, if you have a crucial friendship online, take care to explain how you feel to your friend and be explicit about how you see this friendship. Or, if you feel that a friendship might be misconstrued by your friend as a crucial friendship, then do the same thing. Talking clearly about your feelings reduces misunderstandings. In the end, it’s not productive or healthy to spend my every evening engaged in chat with someone who doesn’t view my friendship as crucial.