Friendships

It is not unusual for people to have exclusively online friendships. I am talking about people whom you met through some social network and then went to forge close friendships with them. A social network is a nice way to meet people with a common interest. These friendships bloom because it totally takes out the initial awkwardness that comes with opening up with someone. In real life, you rarely meet people purely because they have common interests. It may be because you went to school together or are from the same neighborhood or are part of a community or are they went to college together or were colleagues. Most of these friendships are not friendships for the sake of being friends but are just something you stumble upon. When it comes to online friendships it is totally the opposite.

Personally, for me, none of the "friendships", to this date, that were forged online have lasted more than 3 years. There is this odd conversation once in blue moon, but other than that, nothing. Most of these friendships turn into acquaintances. It is never the same as it started out. I  remember reading during my Tamil classes that a friendship should be like a sugarcane. A sugarcane sweetens as you eat it from the bottom to up. I will pin down online relationships fading away to the fact that boils down just common interests. Interests are like seasons, they keep changing, once you take away the interest that bound people together, they fall apart. I believe that's what happens with online friendships.

Longest surviving friendships of mine have been with people I went to school with. What bound us together was that we were all in the same class, played cricket together nearly every day, after school, stayed in the same neighborhood. We spent nearly 80% of the time with of each other. I thought we would all find our own ways and would part with each other when we went to college. We still hung on, as we would meet every weekend and play cricket in the backyard. I thought we would probably stop hanging out once we stopped playing cricket  and then when we started working and meet new people . The amount of cricket we played decreased, but we still hung out together. The amount of time we spent together decreased a lot, but still, it was nothing compared to the time spent with our other spheres of friends. 13 years on I still see them more than any other group of friends.

I was wondering what forged such a bond that I didn't think it wasn't even possible. We had totally different personalities and yet we got along, very well. I guess in order to have a strong bond, you should spend a lot of time together, have comfortable silences, should not be friends for the sake of being friends, have more than one common interest that brings you together and of course be unmarried :-D