INTERNET FRIENDS

© Debbie Kruger 1999

Everybody's doing internet relationships. Email friendships have superseded old-fashioned penpals. People meet in chat rooms and fall in love. It's been depicted on the big screen, in You've Got Mail, and even small screen Summer Bay has had the Instant Message bug, with Home and Away siblings Tom and Gypsy recently falling for each other online, blissfully ignorant of their real relationship.

A friend in Sydney determinedly scoured AOL to find his perfect match. She's in Los Angeles, they've visited each other several times, and he’s moving to LA and marrying her next year.

A couple of years ago I wrote an article about friends I had made through an online community of Eagles fans (the rock group, not football team) and my travels overseas meeting some of them. The article didn't dwell on my impressions of them in person compared with their online personalities, mainly because they all knew I was writing the story and made me promise to send them copies. So I restrained myself in the telling, yet still managed to upset a few people who were happy to share themselves in a chat room but found it affronting to have snippets of their stories told in print, even if they were only mentioned by first name and no-one reading in Australia would know or care who they really were.

The thrust of my story was that internet friendships can be as fulfilling and rewarding as any other friendship made in the "real" world, and that I had been fortunate to find a bunch of caring, fun people.

And that's true enough. But having just spent a full year in the USA, making and meeting more internet friends , and reuniting with some I had met on the previous trip, my feelings are less sentimental. I have realised that yes, some people utilise the web to make connections and are perfectly willing and able to develop those relationships in real life.

And then there are the others. Those who are socially insecure for whatever reason — physical appearance, emotional instability — and feel safer about expressing themselves hidden behind their keyboards. Or those who are not really interested in having a relationship with another person at all, who are really just having a relationship with their computer.

The problem — or perhaps the adventure of it — is that you can never tell. Some internet friendships are enhanced by face to face contact, in others the magic is lost.

A bunch of us met in a city on the US East Coast two years ago. It was interesting, partly fun, and partly boring because even I can take only so much Eagles talk. But our hostess, Michelle, subsequently proved eager to step out of that paradigm and offer me friendship on other levels. We had similar cultural roots and explored that in emails, and when I moved to Los Angeles last year she loaned me money, called me regularly to chat and offer support, and made it clear that she was a friend in need. So a month before I was due to come home to Australia, I told Michelle that I would fly over to visit her. I longed to spend time chatting over cups of tea, bringing some intimacy to our long-distance relationship.

Michelle arranged for another online pal to join us for the weekend. I wanted a quiet intimate weekend and not another Eagles fest, but in this case the other friend was someone I was very keen to meet.

Lesley lives in another East Coast city, and she and I had bonded early last year via email. She took a special interest in some of the personal issues I was tackling in my life, and wrote long emails full of insight, wit and sage advice. Lesley professed to be a white witch, and sent me fabulously elaborate and empowering spells and rituals that I could enact to achieve my goals in life. When I got to LA, we spoke on the phone regularly in empathetic conversations for hours on end. I adored her and couldn’t wait to meet her in person.

Now maybe I am not the most scintillating company on earth, but I was at a loss to explain the behaviour of either Michelle or Lesley during that long weekend we all spent together. Michelle seemed to feel that having brought Lesley and me together, her own presence was not required, and she retired to her bedroom to watch TV.

Lesley, on the other hand, sat herself down in front of Michelle’s whiz-bang ultra-hi-tech computer, and spent the entire weekend checking email, working on her Glenn Frey website, and being very quiet, due to an interestingly-timed bout of laryngitis.

Which left me to go off on my own to the Museum of Fine Arts and ponder the whole concept of internet friendships.

I returned to LA and called my friend Nena. Nena and I had originally connected in a chat room but on meeting in person found we had far more to talk about than the Eagles and computers, and over time built a solid friendship based on many other things. We often congratulated ourselves on being the only “normal” internet people we knew, and hung out together a lot.

So I called Nena on my return from the East Coast, and told her that was it, no longer would I spend time and money travelling long distances to meet internet friends. Nena had already had her share of unsettling experiences with online people and could only concur.

But here's the thing. I really miss Lesley. I miss her emails and her insight and her magic spells — even if they didn't work. She never contacted me again after that visit, and never responded to my communications. I don't know what happened for her that weekend, whether seeing me in the flesh was a disappointment, whether it brought up feelings of insecurity within herself, or whether she just hated me. I suspect that Michelle's computer was just a more enticing companion.

As for Michelle, she had a dying father and has a busy working life away from the computer; I'd like to think that she was just having a bad weekend, and one day we will see each other again and drink lots of tea and talk about things we think and feel.

I have a new email friend in Melbourne. She writes intelligent, witty, supportive emails, calls me occasionally, and stresses that there is no hurry for us to meet. I concur.