Internet Friends

Relationship (relay shon ship)
Noun?
I am my own best friend and lover in speech. I put myself into the world and filter the responses. You are there to satisfy me when I am bored, tired, lonely, horny or feeling curious. You live in the margins of my material reality and online existence. You are real, partially, part yourself and part my projection. You play a function. Emphasis on play - play is the function and yet it’s not a game.

Romeo and Juliet is an archetypal love story: they didn’t meet online, but they should have. They met how we like to imagine we meet our lovers - at a party, a chance encounter. We place a great premium on chance - ‘love at first sight’. Although, theirs is not a chance encounter, but rather, one bound by the fickles of fortune, fate, a cosmic pattern. Their ‘chance’ first encounter forms a perfectly sculpted sonnet, subtly hidden in the lines:
R: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
R: This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
R: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
R: To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

J: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
J: Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
J: For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
J: And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

R: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
J: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
R: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
J: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
R: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.

Romance is inherently artful, artificial. It is also at its most seductive when ambiguous - the moment prior, will they won’t they; before the embrace, pre-definition. The internet is the perfect space for both artful exchanges and ambiguity: online relationships elude definition, and the concept is so new that we scarcely have the language to define them.

When we speak to people online we are performing, scripting, and like Romeo and Juliet, in some ways we have agency, though in many ways we don’t. We can endlessly perfect our formulas, so that our idealised self collides with the perfect idealised other. But most of the time, our online encounters are fractured and messy, interrupted by reality. We’ve taken to mourning the idea that finding someone online is less special than irl because it lacks the element of chance. And yet, chance plays a huge role in connecting through online spaces that are infinitely broader than real lives, where a profile can come and go apparently at the random flick of a switch, and although the algorithms exist to guide us towards another in the same way that material circumstances do, we largely don’t know how those algorithms function.

Online flirtation is one of my favourite past times because it reinforces the self. I’m blunt and cute. What are you? Paradoxically, and despite the apparent deceptions we produce, internet relationships allow for a level of intensity and intimacy lacking in the early stages of face to face friendships: two idealised versions of us meet here, in a space where we have total control of our narratives, which we can selectively impose on one another through snippets of communication that is free from the usual static of everyday life - the figurative hum of social spaces, bars, reputions, social circles, practicalities. It’s quiet here - just us. Communicating with someone consistently online is clear cut; what lacks in gesture, expressions, is gained through the clarity of black and white text, that allow an entire relationship to be read back.

Some online relationships serve an explicit function, to bring together two avatars with the intention of an irl encounter. They are a means to an end. Or, that end is sexual gratification, and while reaching it can take a while, the end nevertheless exists. And yet, there are those that are an end within themselves - pure communication with an other. A relationship, surely.

I spoke intermittently but often regularly to one person on the other side of the world for almost a year. I picked up fragments of his life from social media, and he mine, but mainly, our conversations lacked context. While we, and I far more than him, injected details of our real lives and what we were doing in that moment to our chats, simply chatting was the basis of the conversations. We chatted while at work, in bed, in the bath, on public transport - often unaware of the time in the other’s country, simply chatting, and sending pictures - often nudes, but also small fragments - an outfit, a landscape, an article we thought the other would like. We developed a relationship whose sole foundations were our words. None of the usual clutter of shared interests, communities, work - just chit chat, although the more we spoke and the more intimate we became the more curious I got about his life, scouring the web for collateral information. That kind of intimacy is hard to explain, but it’s an intimacy of language. What I got from him was a manner, and like any real life relationship we established private jokes, and a way of mocking each other, from subtleties as minor as using certain punctuation, or even a couple of words. Once, I saw someone I recognised as his friend at a party and my first instinct was to introduce myself as his friend, but I quickly realised how odd that would be. Sometimes, he’d go weeks without responding, and I’d wonder if we’d never speak again, but still, sometimes, he pops up, in the form of a response to a photo, or to lightly take the piss out of something I post.

I interviewed a number of teenagers online about their ‘internet friendships’; I found all of them on a viral Twitter thread about discovering your internet friends lived extremely close to you, or were even someone you knew. At first, I was fascinated by the more extreme examples, such as the boy in Chicago that discovered his ‘internet friend’ of a few months was in fact his cousin. When they both found out, they stopped chatting, and only saw each other intermittently at family events.

I spoke at greater length to a few other teenagers about their internet relationships, and some stood out to me for the language they used to describe these relationships - while younger people are far more used to fostering these kind of online relationships than an older generation, I felt there was a beautiful naivety in the way that expressed their feeling for strangers, or at least, a lack of cynicism and suspicion an adult may have had that would cause them to hold back slightly, as though they were unaware like I was that there was a line they might cross, where they would give away too much of their vulnerability to an unknown other.

Peter is a 17 year old from Venice. He met Mara, who is 15, online five years ago playing Minecraft. They started talking in the chat box, and then in just a couple of weeks of chatting: “We really became close...like really close, she knew things that not even my IRL friends knew. I just felt I had that kind of connection and that I could trust her.” Although Peter later admits that the internet was an important space for him as a young gay Italian that found a community online, his relationship to Mara never at first seemed particularly deep: ‘Maybe we just bonded cause we could play a lot... We met some other friends and have made a group whom we still play with but I really feel like me and her were on a whole other level..we had that chemistry that no one had.’

After months of talking, Peter and her discovered while they were doing their homework together on a video call that they lived round the corner from one another:
‘I was in shock. I couldn’t believe that the girl I’ve been playing with for almost 6 months was 20 minutes away from my house.’ They later met accompanied by their parents at a gaming convention, and while they began to spend time at each other’s houses, their relationship mainly took place online, through the medium of gaming: ‘After Minecraft we changed games and started playing Overwatch...we needed some practice but after a while we could literally read each other’s mind, we could predict what the other was going to do before they would do that, we just had THAT kind of connection.’ Peter says he even came out to Mara before many of his irl friends: ‘She was so supportive I almost cried. I’m really greatful for having her in my life and I really think that that game on Minecraft changed my whole fucking life.’

I also spoke to a girl called Alex from Poland, who spoke to a girl called Suzi every day for two years before she decided to make the six hour train journey across Poland to meet her. Just before they both met, the two have said they were both very stressed because they didn’t even know what the other looked like “But when we saw each other, I think we just felt like we’re the right ones. As time goes now I feel like our meeting was like a destiny!”

They still speak all the time, and since Alex’s father died and she began suffering from depression, Suzi has supported her - remotely - throughout. Alex speaks about Suzi with the intensity that one describes a lover, but when questioned on the nature of their friendship, she won't’ confirm if it’s more than platonic:

‘We love eachother - not in a romantic way, but someday...Who knows - it’s more than that...I don’t think that’s a friendship any more, it’s a whole new thing that is beyond that. It is...hard knowing how far she is, but I have big hopes for meeting her again.’

Alex at once implies that she can’t articulate the meaning of this relationship (it’s a whole new thing that is beyond that), but what she describes is at once ambiguous and crystal clear - ‘destiny’.

Since I stopped speaking to that one internet friend, I’ve made another, who I’ve also since seen in person and now is more of a real life friend. But we also spoke for months online before meeting, and even since meeting, we chat lots online - similarly contextless, sending memes, and chatting about random things. We now live around the corner from each other, so we could meet up much more often than we do, but there’s something I like about our friendship taking place mainly online - it has a sense of intimacy and playfulness, but also ambiguity, that you can’t get irl. In fact, sometimes in person, I’ve been struck by how awkward we are together. But online, pauses aren’t awkward, and you can say anything and then qualify it by making it a joke. In this sense, our relationship online is guarded, but also the frequency at which we speak, and share the details of what we’re doing in that moment (taking a bath/cooking dinner/lying in bed scrolling) provide a sense of comfort and closeness that dissipate when we meet in formal situations, like going for walks and drinks.

The most notable thing about this particular friend is that I know very little about his life offline, despite us having met in person. It’s as though even our irl relationship is an extension of that online - we talk about things here and now - make small observations about what we see around us, and crack jokes about whatever we’re doing - making food, or walking around the neighbourhood. We thrive online because ours is a relationship of words - in many ways, like my other friendship online, it feels like we’ve constructed a private shared language together, where we build on each other's tone and phrases to create mutual understanding. In a way, this is flirtation or communication at its ideal, like Romeo and Juliet’s sonnet, sharing the lines and both adhering to the rules to create a private poem subtly hidden in your messages.

This reminds me of the line in one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets: ‘We’ll build sonnets in pretty rooms’. Private chats are those rooms, which we can build sonnets in, and in that sense, I think the internet provides a space for language play unlike any other. Unlike letters they are immediate, unlike phone calls they are ambiguous, unlike in person, they are free of awkwardness and commitment.

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