Online Friendships: Why I’m No Longer Playing by the Rules

Growing up, my family moved house many times — five different schools in the first seven years of my schooling journey. It didn’t make for establishing lifelong friendships. It did, however, make for accumulating a collection of pen-pal friendships, fostering in me an eternal love of letter writing — this once beautiful art now just another wistful reminder of slower days replaced by the instant gratification of a technological world.

There are wonderful things, of course, that have morphed inside these transitional decades. The ability to communicate with anyone, anytime. A myriad of connections, many who live in different time zones — some we’ve met, most we haven’t. A lifetime of people and places we have gathered in our arms all held within the grasp of our hand. Online dating. The capacity to stalk those we would contemplate online dating — or so I’ve heard.

Our culture is reshaping, and no more so than in our social interactions. Where once the only communication with a friend was a letter in the mail, now endless digital messages demand our attention 24/7. We suffocate in the chaos of overcrowded inboxes; choke on the pressure of the instant reply, fear the repercussions of not giving an instant reply.

All of this has led to a change in the rules of friendship, and I’m here to tell you the verdict is in: I suck at this new game.

This finding comes after the recent loss of a friendship. Though we had met and hung out in real life, it was primarily an online friendship due to being continents apart that consisted of messages on an almost daily basis. Both being writers, readers, philosophers they were often lengthy and deep messages — which in itself, was lovely.

But I soon discovered this about online friendship: what would have once been the content of one handwritten letter every week, soon became the content of one message every day, if not numerous times a day. What I also soon discovered is this volume of messaging is f*cking exhausting to maintain, and as time went on, it became more difficult to reply as often, or in kind.

If nothing else, our lives were in direct contrast — she, single and childless, opposed to me trying to balance the demands of farm life, writing life, and family life with four children. I would find myself apologising regularly, I’m so sorry I haven’t replied to your message yet, it’s been another crazy busy day, I’ll try and reply tomorrow, I’ll try and reply next week. I did the best I could to reply when I was able, but I know she continually felt fobbed.

It came to a head late last year when she flew to Australia to visit another friend only an hour away, but didn’t visit me. I later discovered due to my lack of response to her messages, she felt I had ghosted her at worst, not invested enough into the friendship at best. What she couldn’t see was how overwhelmed I was at that time with everything else going on in my life — that the lack of investment was not isolated to her.

I was dropping balls everywhere; doing too much, stretched too thin, barely holding together any the relationships in my life. I was drowning in inboxes filled with un-replied messages but knew I had to step back from everything for a time or I was unlikely to find a way to surface again.

I tried to explain this. She unfriended me. Ouch.

It hadn’t occurred to me until then how much friendship has changed; the expectations placed upon us by the digital age in the amount we communicate. The way we measure friendship now upon a scale of how accessible, connected and present we are online, god forbid we have to participate in life beyond our screen and inadvertently make our online friends feel we aren’t invested in their lives.

Such has become the trap of modern-day friendship, that we find ourselves caught in such unrealistic expectation to maintain so many relationships with so many different people at once, often at the detriment to ourselves.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar studied the nature of friendship over several decades and in his theory, known as Dunbar’s Number, he states the number of people the human mind can maintain stable and social relationships with — based on the time we have to invest and the mental capacity of which we have to function well in those friendships — is 150.

Yet in one scroll through our social media platforms, we’ve connected to the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of people, in the space of mere minutes. Our prefrontal cortexes must be reeling. Now wonder we feel overwhelmed trying to maintain such measure of friendships technology has allowed into our lives.

I’ve thought much about it all since it happened. I lost a friendship not because I suck at the new rules, but because I’ve chosen not to play by them. It’s not that I’m uninvested, but merely someone who would rather invest what little time I do have on real-life experience — to gaze across at a face rather than into a screen.

I still have other online friends, we write back and forth when time and energy permit, free of expectation. But what I’ve learned is there is only so much we can do with what we have. If others take our lack of immediate response as a personal rejection, this isn’t our problem. To be a good friend doesn’t mean we must exhaust ourselves to meet another’s expectation of what a good friend should be. We must define our own ideal of friendship and gather into our circle those whose ideals align with ours.

We’re only just verging on the cusp of these new rules. The iGen and Alpha Gen will suffer more the pressure of this instant, demanding culture than our generation has and it’s up to us to help them balance this culture — to embrace the advantages of instant communication while knowing how to set solid boundaries in what time and energy they will allow themselves to give online. We need to teach them how to be resilient to the pressure and demand of technology and help them understand the benefit in not allowing themselves to be accessible at all times.

Mostly, we need to demonstrate through our own friendships the value of real-life interaction so the fragile beauty of our human connection doesn’t become the next thing lost to this digital age.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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