beth, I was just talking to a friend of mine about this last night! How I sometimes have to make a decision to either go outside and be social or stay home and be social with all of you. It’s tough in that it is a lot easier to meet people and find out about them here because there is generally a lot more of the person available to review (past and current posts and others reactions/comments on them) than you would have IRL. I would tend to think that in some instances, people are a bit more open here, well, maybe it’s a chat thing, but you know what I mean.
For me, it’s a little more involved because I came to this board when I was living in NC, then moved to Ohio and am now on assignment in Kentucky. I’ve met and left friends a’plenty in the last year but those on the board travel with me everywhere. When I went to Denver for training, I was able to see you all. When I go home for a weekend, you’re there. Every night when I head into mIRC, I know some of you will be there, even if I only pop in to say “Hi, how’s everyone doing? Well, gotta go.” IRL, this is not the case. I’m lucky in that I’ve made some friends everywhere I’ve moved, but those two or three friends have lives too, that often don’t include me. So…what to do. I make a decision to go out alone. I’ve been to movies alone, I’ve gone to pubs alone and you know, it’s not great, but it’s not that bad.
Part of what lets me not worry about going out is knowing that if the evening is a bust, I can come home and log on and you all will be there. I had to decide that going out and being social was not necessarily more important than being here with you guys, but at least as important. There is nothing wrong with feeling that the people here are your friends, though I think some parts of society have formed a stigma of “on-line losers” and don’t understand that real and true friendships can and do develop between people that have never met and might not ever meet. Some people liken on-line friendships to the trash you hear about in the news of sickos taking advantage of people they meet online then IRL without realizing that that is such a miniscule percentage of the people on the net, and that the people here, by and large, are not those new-worthy freaks.
We are intelligent, compassionate, witty, flirty, interested, normal people that have had the luck to find this site, this community, and introduce ourselves. We are neighbors, friends and sparring partners, and there is no shame in wanting to be more a part of this than the one outside your door. This is not “a substitute for meaningful human interaction", this is meaningful human interaction and it is just as real.
I wish I were more articulate, that I might be able to convey what I mean better, but I’m not. I’m an engineer, a Marine and a single guy away from home that just had his 28[sup]th[/sup] birthday and got to celebrate it with a couple of phone calls and emails, a few beers with one of my friends down here and numerous birthday wishes from Dopers from all over the country and world. I have no regrets about the time I spend here and I make no excuses to those that don’t understand. [{(|Evilbeth|)}]
-Eric
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p.s.: all of thinksnows’ extended family is either in New York or the Netherlands, so he only sees them about once every four years. Many of his closest friends and all of his Marine Corps buddies live hundreds or thousands of miles away and only communicate by phone or letter. He is used to relationships based more on content than personal appearance. [/sub]
)2) care about each other, even though we have never met each other (again, for the most part…) 3) uh… OK, I was drinking earlier with my fiancee, and have lost any semblance to coherancy…