21st Century Friendships
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Just me on Monday, November 10, 2008 9:50 PM
It was a good thing that Camilla’s cousin came over to play today. Otherwise she and I would have been feeling bereft, because our friend was visiting last week and now she has gone home.
Technically Lauren was my friend first, but I think of her as “our” friend because she and Bryan have an excellent casual rapport and Camilla adores her. We also get along very well with her husband, and all of us wish our families lived closer than four states away.
In fact, pretty much the only awkward thing about my friendship with Lauren is that people sometimes ask us how we know each other.
Thanks to the proliferation of singles’ websites, “we met on the Internet” has become a fairly commonplace admission from couples. On the other hand - but maybe it’s just me - it seems like people are often surprised to hear that people who are friends have met online.
But Lauren and I really did meet on the Internet, specifically through my blog, which she found and read for a while before emailing me. We were friends-by-email for more than a year before I happened to be visiting the town where she lives and we met for brunch. We hit it off enormously well, and since then we’ve made a number of visits back and forth, each one better than the previous.
Last month Danielle hosted a conversation about the blessings and challenges we face when online communication is a part of our lives. The comments were insightful and I could relate to many of them. I’ve experienced some of the downsides of blogging and many more of the rewards, enough so that I happily anticipate continuing to do it for the foreseeable time. But if something happened and I had to quit blogging tomorrow, and could never have access to my online communities again (sad!), I’d still feel the whole venture was worth it because of the friends I’ve made.
Besides Lauren, I have another good originally-Internet friend whom we’ve visited and who is on my speed dial, and a handful of other friends whom I’ve met and with whom I happily exchange Christmas cards and regular emails.
For me the coolest thing about these friendships is that I have nothing in common with these women geographically, and it’s unlikely I would have met them if it hadn’t been for the Internet. Yet they enrich my life in numerous ways. I never imagined when I started writing in my little corner of the Internet four years ago that the connections would extend to my real life. Isn’t it nice when God blesses us in unexpected ways?
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