When is the Virtual Real?

I've been reading a lot of posts lately about various people and their descriptions of in person versus online connections and relationships. Some of the thoughts I've been wrangling with is when is a virtual friendship considered real too, and are there any criteria to be met? Are there varying levels of online friendships as there are in in-person relationships? How do you know the person you know online is the same person offline? Does an online friendship come with the same benefits as an offline one?


There seems to be a growing trend that I see where people have more online friends than offline. I am quite curious about this, I consider myself to have quite a few of both but the people I consider to be genuine friends are mostly offline. This is not to cheapen the connections I have made online, but for me at least, I need the tangible, I need to look someone in the eye.


An excellent case in point would be my fiancee, we met online, and then offline very soon after. We both had the need to validate that the person online was a true reflection of the person offline. It engenders a new level of trust between two people. No longer is the relationship based on asynchronous messages back and forth, it's based on being in the here and now, and I'm happy to say the relationship is going from strength to strength.


So lets look at the flip side of the coin, and to be honest I can only think of one online friend I haven't met face to face. You can blame the HIRL and other events for that. How do I classify him as a friend? I have a genuine concern for his and his family's well-being, we enjoy a good rapport, have similar interests, but the level of trust is different. Would I trust him with my children? Probably not. Why? Because I've never looked him in the eye.


Social networking has certainly made it easier to meet new people and upped the odds of forming friendships, your net can be cast wider and seeking people out who are similar to yourself has certainly been made almost trivial.


But how similar are they really?


We all have our internet persona, we put it all out there in many cases, tell complete strangers our innermost feelings and failings. Why? Would you say these things to a person standing a couple feet away from you? Again probably not. It's like we are all children again. I often sit out on sunny evenings and watch my kids at play. I'm innately jealous of how easy they find it to form relationships. It's laughable, but one of the few things I remember from High School Musical and watching it with my kids was Gabriella saying,


"Do you remember in kindergarten, how you'd meet a kid, and know nothing about them, then 10 seconds later you're playing like you're best friends, because you didn't have to be anything but yourself?"


Somewhere between now and then fear and insecurity sets in, social stigmas are applied, and we lose that ability to just be ourselves. With the internet we really don't even have to be ourselves anymore, we can be whomever we want to be. So it comes back to the same question, how do you gauge an online friendship with someone you've never met in person. When they can be whomever they want to be and so can you. Would you still be friends?