by Riley MacDonell

Created on: September 27, 2009   Last Updated: September 28, 2009

Friendship is defined as a friendly relationship or "the mutually cooperative and supportive behavior between two or more people" if you prefer Wikipedia's definition. Nowhere is it stated that for a friendship to be real it must have been at first initiated in person through either some sort of social function, school or work related activity, or random meeting. So based on the definition, yes, Internet friends can be real friends.

There is a social stigma around developing relationships online but it seems to be quickly fading with each passing year. When online dating sites like eHarmony and Match.com first were introduced to the public, people were skeptical. There was a lot of "why can't Annie just meet somebody the traditional way?" and "I don't see why Johnny has to use these newfangled Internets to find a date" going on, but, given a few years and tons of advertising campaigns, the sites took off and millions of people joined them. In fact, a few years ago my recently-divorced aunt joined one such site and, what to do you know, she found the love of her life. It turned out that they had been living in the same town the whole time but never would have come across each other the traditional way because they each ran with different crowds, had their own busy lives to worry about and (even if they had met somehow through the "traditional way") probably wouldn't have realized that the other was looking for a serious relationship. A few months after being matched up they were well on their way to becoming the happiest couple in all of West Hartford, and a few months after that they were married.

Finding friends online is different than finding your soulmate though. For starters, you don't have to pay some reputable site to create a profile online, so you don't need the level of dedication that many highly regarded dating sites demand. You can find friends basically anywhere online: in chat rooms, forums, message boards, facebook, myspace, and any other social networking site. Your online friends can be from anywhere that the Internet is accessible, from Tanzania to Latvia to New Zealand, France and Timbuktu and everywhere in between. Depending on the distance between you it might make sense to meet up in person or it might just be a given that you will probably never meet face-to-face.

In some ways, you might feel like your Internet friends are even better friends than the people you hang out with on a constant basis. Through the Internet we are able to portray

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>