Who are my friends?

[ohanamd]

Who are my friends? Who are your friends? Am I your friend? Are you mine?

Even more to the point, what is a friend?

For many years I’ve chuckled to myself about how loosely some people use the term “friend.”

Comments

She dares to show her face again . ..

[ar_wahan]

"2. Acquaintances: These are people we’ve met in some way (in person or online) but with whom we’ve had little in-depth conversation. We probably haven’t spent much (if any) social time with acquaintances. We probably don’t know much beyond surface-level information about our acquaintances. Many of our online friends are, in my terminology, acquaintances."

Perhaps the difference in our perceptions and my disgruntlement with the ways things have gone is that I was an acquaintance, by your definition. And of course, you are correct. Here's the rub, though. The reason I was drawn to "friend" you [(LJ definition, not yours! ;)] was that I saw in your posts last winter and in your user info someone with whom I could see the potential for online "in-depth conversation." Not the kind one often finds on LJ -- which are really short replies to someone else's journal, such as:
LOL
*hugs*
"good luck with your [whatever occasion the journal writer has described]."

Those little pats on the back are nice -- I'm not complaining about them, mind you -- but I thought with our common interests, passions and backgrounds, we might have something more in-depth. And here, in your list of types of friends, I don't see that sort of thing described. I can't just write, "This acquaintance--->friendship, if it developed, would fall under #Whatever." It can't fall under #7 because your definition seems to be saying that you already have to be close to a person to read their blogs or journals and comment on them . . . "I choose whose blog entries to read based on how close I feel with that person - or how close I’d like to feel with him or her."

But if you never read the entries of people you do not already know in RL, how will you ever know whether you would -- or would not -- like to feel close with him or her?

I know right after I friended you, you suggested I join Care2Connect because there was a more mature, adult group there, rather than a lot of teens and 20-somethings. That was a sweet gesture, and I did sign up. But I have never done anything beyond that. In part, it is because my life has been so busy, and the community I have on LJ is already taking up too much time! (Though I let it... :). But it has also been because I have met a number of people on LJ close to my age and we have, in fact, become close in friendship. A true delight for me was to discover that two of them noticed the other's comments on my journal, and now are commenting back and forth on their journals! And I expect to meet each of them in person, in different places, within the next year or so.

Like mforbes321, I also "have some friends that I'd trust with anything, that I've known since high school [since preschool and kindergarten, in my case] but because our lives are so different and busy I just don't talk to that often. When we do finally catch up it's like no time has passed between us at all and I treasure those friendships."

Peace. Shalom. Blessed be.

Re: She dares to show her face again . ..

[ohanamd]

I see you as an acquaintance who is becoming a friend. My experience of it is that these messages have moved you along in the direction of being a friend.

I have more to say, and I'll wait until tomorrow. That's one of my idiosyncrasies (that doesn't look to me like it's spelled right). I sometimes need to process things awhile before I'm ready to respond.