I have posted a few times now about my online friends and how valuable they have been to me at different times. Even the ways in which our existence has crossed over in very real ways to each other’s lives. Online friendships are real and they are valid. I support and celebrate them. But this post isn’t about them.
My online friends are people I met online and have only ever known in the context of an online friendship. I have never met these people physically in real life. The people I am talking about today are the people that we meet in real life, who become online only friends. Those are generally categorised into a few groups. There is the acquaintances who added you to social media. You don’t really know why, but you went along with it. It’s a little awkward when they like personal posts and you wonder if you really would have shared that information with them personally, however, usually life moves on without much more thought. If you are very uncomfortable you unfriend them and it’s likely neither of you notice.
Then there are the friends from afar. People you had solid relationships with, but moved away or the friendship became distant circumstantially but the love is still there. These are the friends you wish you could see more in real life. The ones you want to share your personal news with and want to share in theirs too. You connect online and it is enough for both parties because you still feel connected. You probably share private messages to give more details and keep in closer personal contact than just a like on a status here and there and a happy birthday post once a year. These people are friends, who happen to be mostly online at the moment but you hope that will change in the future.
The last group is the awkward group. The people who you started a friendship with, but for whatever reason it seemed to stall. Time between catch up’s got longer, or somebody asked for space. And you end up as online friends only, not even really sure if you are in fact still friends. Even if you have actively fallen out with this person, somehow deleting them online seems difficult. The online platforms are the only remaining connections, like a life support machine. This article on www.nbcnews.com published on April 13 2019, called “How to cope when a friend breaks up with you” written by Jen Glantz captures the essence of what I mean. The article shares the experience of a woman who has experienced a fri-ending, and here is the quote.
“what was even harder was unfriending her on social media. I knew that I had to, not just because I didn’t want to look at her life without me in it, but because she was still liking things I posted on Facebook and Instagram, as if our friendship was still going strong. Unfriending her online was the right thing to do since she pressed the unfriend button offline.”
(NOTE: Links to the articles on the break up and “orbiting” - the term used to describe this behaviour, are well worth a read!)
It doesn’t really matter which one of you parked the friendship online. It doesn’t have to be a mutual decision. In the best cases, it is, and life moves nicely along. You like each other enough but just didn’t have the spark in person, or enough in common, or your schedules didn’t align or something benign. It isn’t personal and it isn’t even enough of a big deal to discuss. When it isn’t a mutual decision though, the conversation is awkward.
How do you tell someone that you don’t want them in your life, but you do expect them to keep being socially polite in public and keep up on social media in case you change your mind one day and decide to resuscitate the friendship? Especially if they don’t want that? If you are the person who has been parked online against your will, do you still want to keep tabs of your friend and what they are busy doing with everyone else if you are no longer invited to the proverbial party?
Each person has to make their own decision here without knowing the intention of the other. If either of you hold hope that the friendship will revive itself one day, I suppose the best thing to do is to maintain this base level of interaction. A like here, a comment there. Just enough to show you are still around, but not too much that it seems like begging for attention. I can tell you from experience that this is hard to do when you have been parked against your will. Because seeing someone you were once close to getting closer to everyone else and further away from you hurts. And reading their comments and likes on your own posts feels empty when they used to know the details first hand. This period can last for years though, and I assume if you can get through the initial difficulty of acceptance, it may be worth it in the long term.
Because your other option is to refuse to engage. If you don’t want to be on life support, you can be the one to pull the plug. If you feel the person is trying to put you on hold, and you aren’t a phone call, then you can hang up. But there is no way around this. Whatever you do that is outside the wishes of the person who parked you there, whether that is refusing to engage, restricting access, unfollowing or unfriending, or deactivating, you are pulling the plug. You are saying you no longer wish to participate under these terms. You are saying “all or nothing” and it will end in goodbye.
There is nothing wrong with that if that is what you want. You do not have to be parked online. You cannot force someone to continue being your friend the way they once were, but you also don’t have to be forced to participate in ways you find painful. The problem is that this is an emotionally loaded decision. If you disengage to prove a point, that nobody puts baby in a corner, then you may well be cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Hopefully you will be able to find ways to directly communicate with your friend about the reasons this has happened if it is upsetting. However if you are the person who made this choice, you might not even really have the words yourself to articulate the shift, or you may just prefer to avoid the issue and basically deny the lack of any real friendship. This is likely. So the person making the ultimate decision is in a very difficult and emotional place.
How long should they wait for you to take them off life support? How much can they tolerate of liking pictures and statuses of how happy you are without their presence? How much of their own lives do they still want to share with you under these circumstances? If they turn off the machine, will you understand they didn’t feel they had a choice? It’s not really fair to park someone online and then put all the responsibility on them if it ends.
Online friendships, and social media platforms can be great for friendships. As we all experienced with the recent pandemic, they can thrive and survive there. They can even be born there. But the dark side is, that it is also where they go to die a slow painful death sometimes too. Often you don’t even realise you are there until you have been there a fair while, and your intuition starts to tell you something isn’t adding up!
Some people cope better with this than others. I suppose it depends on how close the dying friendship was to begin with as to the level of pain and anguish felt at this point. Also the level of desire for it to be what it was rather than what it is. This transition period is always difficult, but seeing it all online and acting as if you’re ok when you aren’t, makes it near impossible.
So I ask you to ask yourself if you are willing to save the friendship? If you are, then enduring this treatment may be the only solution for a while, until it resolves, or until acceptance means it doesn’t hurt so much anymore. If you can’t do that, then maybe you can’t be friends. Not for now anyway.
They may put the online only sign on your door, but the do not resuscitate sign is all your choice. Choose wisely. Only you know the answer that is right for you, but there may not be second chances. Then again, keeping online connections with people who don’t seem to particularly like you sounds a lot like having haters, and who has time for that?!
❤ Love,
Your Best Friend ForNever
xx
