2008-02-15 Internet friends

We often hear what a dangerous place the internet can be, yet it also offers a unique opportunity to develop deep and long-lasting friendships with people throughout the world.

I have been an active e-mailer and participant in newsgroups, message boards, and e-mail lists for almost twenty years. I have made dozens of friends whom I have never met in person, and quite a few whom I’ve met in real life after having known them online for years. I have attended gatherings both near and far. People have visited me from out of town, out of state, and even from other countries.

Shortly before my first daughter was born I joined a small and growing online community where I looked to the more experienced parents for assurance, advice and information. In the earlier days of the internet when access was text only and pictures were not yet digital, photo sharing was not easy as it is today. About once a year a small group of people would put together a photo album of participants with copies for each of us.

I wrote to the newsgroup in 1992 that I was overwhelmed with a 2-year-old and a 2-month-old. I heard from dozens who had been in similar situations. One person who responded has children two months older than each of mine and she and I really clicked. Our daily e-mails were an integral part of life for the next several years and she became one of my very best friends even though she lived over 700 miles away in Maryland. Her Colorado ski trip included a planned layover at O’Hare so we could meet in person for the first time in 1996. Once our family stayed at her house when we took a trip east, another time we planned a Disney World trip together, and later still she and her kids came to stay at my house for a few days when my youngest was a newborn.

As internet usage exploded in the mid-nineties several of us left that larger group and formed a private e-mail list that remains active today. We continued the photo album tradition for several years, always assembled at a big gathering in some part of the US each year for a weekend. I always had at least one small child and felt it would be difficult or impossible and too expensive to attend.

A photo album party was scheduled for late September 2001 in Minneapolis, the closest one ever. But schedules at my house are always complicated – the older kids had school Friday and my son had a Cub Scout campout, and it seemed that it couldn’t work out. Then the world changed on September 11. The next week we were still in a daze and I suddenly felt the need to connect in person with my online friends. I took my two oldest out of school and the girls and I spent the weekend in Minneapolis while my son and his dad stayed home went to the campout. It was just what I needed. It is always a wonderful experience spending time with people you know well, even if their faces are unfamiliar at first.

In 1999 I joined a group for women expecting babies in January of 2000. We have continued to share the ups and downs of parenting over the years and are always there for each other. We exchange Christmas cards and photos and have done some gift exchanges. Sometimes the January 2000 children become pen pals with each other. This group includes people all over the United States as well as Canada, Iceland and Australia.

More recently I have gotten involved in a local online community with a group of people who have a shared interest. We don’t begin to agree on everything but we find value in our discussions. We have the added bonus of living in the same area and can easily set up gatherings and even run into each other at local events.

E-mail has helped me keep up with friends from these groups as well as people whom I already know in real life but may or may not see very often. A very close friend and I have kept in touch regularly via e-mail even though she moved out of state several years ago and we see each other about once a year.

The internet has been the source of many wonderful things in my life, the most rewarding of which are the friendships it has made possible.