What is the internet doing to our friendships?

I hope this finds you somewhere real, in the glow of being seen and loved just as you are.

The other day, I was on Instagram getting ready to double-tap on a picture of my friend’s vacation photo when the absurdity of that very action hit me like a freight train. Until I stumbled upon that post, I had no idea that she was even going on vacation. This is not an internet friend. There was a time, years ago, when I didn’t go even a day without talking to her. We shared our lives in the special way only true friends can do, with the honesty and trust that comes from being safe with someone, knowing that they are in your corner. There was no dramatic friendship breakup between us, nor is there a time I can identify where I decided to “phase out” the friendship. What I know for sure is that the false sense of connection afforded to us by the internet is a big part of why I was looking at a small square picture of my friend and asking myself why she seems like a stranger to me now.

I remember the conversation we had when she told me she would be moving soon. Her husband’s job was taking them out of state. Sitting across from her at her kitchen table, an empty bottle of wine shoved off to the side and a half-full one between us, we told each other how inconsequential this move would be to our friendship. We’ll talk all the time! we told each other. There’s FaceTime and iMessage and email and everything else. We will be just fine. And, we were, for a long while. We made the effort to schedule and keep our phone dates and I saved up little stories from my life to tell her. But, somewhere along the way, I started letting an Instagram post be enough of an update for the week. We sent reaction stickers on our stories, DMs where necessary, and we lulled ourselves into thinking that our friendship was just fine, despite the expanding gulf between us. The internet, the very thing that we thought would rescue our friendship from the distance of the real world, has allowed us to create an even bigger distance between us.

In the chaos of the pandemic, when so many friendships had to shift to make room for our rapidly changing lives, we told ourselves and each other how much easier it is to stay in touch digitally now. At least we have this, we told ourselves. Could you imagine quarantine without the internet? But I quickly realized that after a day of working on the internet (and avoiding my face on video calls), the last thing I wanted to do was get on FaceTime with a friend, no matter how much I wanted to talk to them. There was a short period that awful summer of 2020 when I thought I would revive the art of letter writing. I thought it would be romantic to sit down and write a letter to my friends, walk to the post office to mail my little dispatch and wait to hear back from them. Of course that didn’t last long. I found myself too exhausted to make any effort beyond a passive reaction to whatever content they made on various platforms.

We “see” each other online, sometimes several times a day. We send little red hearts, proclaiming our love for each other in comment sections and private messages. We share our foods, tag locations of the places we go, telling each other and ourselves that our lives are meaningful and exciting - lives and friendships we conduct on stage. A natural byproduct of this, at least for me, has been the shame of feeling (and being) so ridiculous. Admitting that I have not been an attentive friend, knowing that if I were to reach out to the ones I’ve neglected I will have to start with some sort of a reckoning about why I’ve been such an absent friend, none of it is easy. But you know what is easy? A little pink fluttering heart emoji, a winking kissy face emoji, and maybe a short paragraph about how we should really schedule a call soon.