Online Friends

Last week I met a man we’ll call Paul. We met online, which is something as a child I was told “don’t do.”

We messaged online for a week before we grabbed coffee together. After talking to Paul for an hour, I knew this was not going anywhere. There was tension leading up to the first meeting. We trick ourselves into a false intimacy by messaging online before meeting. The person behind the screen can be anyone. But we throw caution to the wind to combat the existential feeling of loneliness.

Towards the end of the date, I turned to Paul and said, “Isn’t it weird that we are okay with meeting people from the internet?” To which he told me he had just started using the dating app we met through.

Since childhood, everything has been oriented toward computers. Chat rooms, AIM, first versions of YouTube, emails, typing papers in school instead of writing. The advances have brought us further online. We can find doctors, clothing, jobs, and just about anything you can think of. The internet has become a source of direct satisfaction.

When I lived in LA (2012-2018), I started to dabble with Tinder and other dating apps. It was the early days of the online dating scene, still seen as taboo.

Yet, there was something that drew me into that exploration. I never met any of the guys I talked to. They were my “pen pals,” a term commonly used in the online dating world. When instead of meeting up, you just endlessly talk online. Around this time of exploration, instead of fulfilling my need for a partner online, I ended up falling in love with my neighbor, someone I met at a party. The first time I met a friend from online, I was 12 years old.

That is how long that exploration has been ingrained in my brain. Normalized. I had friends, I had romantic partners, I had hobbies, but still, there was something so alluring about online connections. He was my friend’s cousin, not a complete stranger. Weird, but not as bad as you can get.

My 12-year-old brain was in love. Cute skateboard guy from the internet. We never fell in love, we never even kissed. We just flirted online, and when I’d see him at the Astoria skatepark, I would freak out, dreaming of a time we would be more than an online friends.

Even then, I had boyfriends, but the grand nature of the online world made me wonder what was out there.

As a New Yorker, the world I grew up in, you keep on thinking three things.

Next job, next apartment, next relationship.

You want an upgrade each time. It’s a vicious cycle that keeps you, 30 years old and single in the city, desperate for more.

My little sister grew up a digital native. Born in 2005, she has only known this advanced version of the internet. Her generation is riddled with a whole new set of issues: cyberbullying, loss of intimacy, and anxiety, to name a few. Our sleep is affected, our cognitive health is affected, and our social lives have shifted. Yet, we still urge to grasp at things online for fulfillment.

We’re desiring intimacy. It’s failing us. We keep falling short.

My story tells the tale of being intrigued by internet friends but knowing that life, real life, was truly happening offline. How do we bridge this gap now? Making impactful relationships from what we have in our hands. Our tiny computers keeping us plugged into the online system. I want to shift from the disembodied online world into an embodied reality of hanging out. There might be a real truth that an embodied world stays a dream. Something that is longed for because it’s not what we live in.

The scale of the internet promises us intimacy. It beckons us back even when we know the difference.