The Reality of Internet Friendships Depends on How Old You Are

I have posted thousands of blogs on the Internet over the last eighteen years, yet I have no close Internet friendships. Is this a problem? For me it is not, as I take friendship very seriously. At my advanced age, I do not believe that someone who has never met me reads what I write and sees in me a real friend.

Every once in a while, I get a message from a stranger, usually a female, asking to chat with me. “About what?” I think. My posted blogs are as far as I will commit myself in print. I have no wish to start a clandestine relationship with someone who is possibly trying to mess with me. The relationships that are important to me are those with Martine, my brother, and my in-person friends, usually people I have known for a long time.

Younger people tend to be more active in seeking out Internet friends. I can understand that: They are more likely to measure their happiness by the number of mutually gratifying contacts they have made. I, on the other hand, am not interested in answering questions about how I feel. In my blogs, I make no secret of how I feel. Why would I need to carry on conversations on the side, so to speak?

If you read my blogs regularly, you know that I have been affected by the summer heat wave that seems only now to be releasing its grip. When Martine and I have gone through rough patches in our relationship, I have written about them and how terrible they made me feel. For instance, Martine left me for several days in 2017. Here is what I wrote when she returned. How would that go over in an e-mail format?

On several occasions, women have messaged me to converse with them. Don’t they realize that I am most frank in my blog posts? I don’t really want to meet up with them. They don’t really have any idea who I am, and they very likely have not read many my my blogs. They could go all the way back to 2012 on WordPress and see how I have felt on an almost daily basis over the last fourteen years.