bchris02 wrote:
Online friends are not good because they don't really care about you. I learned this very painfully. They have their own lives and friends and you are just a bot they can turn on or off whenever they please. If you never logged on again, they wouldn't give a second thought to it.
I tend to think that the Internet is a great way to meet new people, after all look at all the people all over the world who post here on WP. However, if the friendship never goes beyond online, then really there is a lot missing from the friendship. Online friendships can't quite replace real face-to-face relationships. This is not intended to suggest that online friendships are insignificant; on the contrary, we have to remember that there are real people sitting at the keyboards. However, there's only so much you or anybody else can do online, there's tons more out there in the real world remaining to explore. And you don't really know or understand an online friend until you meet him or her in person, face-to-face.
A lot of online friends are really just goodtime friends, so it's important to figure out whether your friendships will ever amount to anything significant. If the online friends never try to help you with your problems, or they never talk about anything of real importance, then that's a sign that the friendship won't end up being anything.