Weighing offline and online friendship

I'm someone who has tasted and tested both sides of friendship — online and offline — and I can say, as it suits me, that the two are the same if well controlled and given the same measure of attention.

There was a time in my life when all I had were offline friendships, and at that time, when the flow wasn’t controlled, I found my time and privacy being deeply encroached upon. I began to wish I had only online friends that I could talk to at my preferred time, and no one would come visiting me uninvited. Also, there were characters and issues like cheating and some not being willing to offer a helping hand when in need. During those times, no matter how plain we tried to be, beefing and unfamiliar behaviors were always present.

I wished my virtual friends were my physical friends.

Back then, my online friends appeared very normal, considerate, and lovely that I wished they were my physical friends, because I doubted there would be those kinds of behaviors I was getting from my physical friends.

This happened mostly during my schooling days, and I often wished I had just virtual people as friends. But honestly, having those friends helped me a lot too, especially during my school days, because I had friends who wrote tests for me while I was away — even during their bad behavior days.

Some years ago, I found myself deeply involved in online friendships to the extent that I didn’t have a single physical friend around me. I wasn’t bothered at all because all the attention and affection that come with friendship, I was getting them online. I was often seen talking via calls and smiling constantly at my phone. I have numerous people I talk to from this platform; some have really turned into good friends, some have cut the ties of friendship, while some are in the process of becoming friends. I have people here that, though we haven’t seen each other, we’ve shared a lot. Some are with my money while I’m holding theirs as well. We’ve built trust on a concrete ground, and the funniest thing is that some of us are not even sure we’ll ever meet physically — especially the non-Nigerians. They appear to be the best and ideal kind of friends, and I doubt things would spoil if we were to be friends in the real world.

But things changed when I realized that even though I had numerous friends online, I still needed physical people around me, because it felt like I was drifting away from the real world all because I was content online. I began to long for friends offline again, and these longings made me understand that we need to try as much as possible to balance our friendships.

These days, I’ve been trying to balance my friendship life. I need people physically around me just as I also need people online whom I can share things with. We can’t have it rosy all the time — there are times we need more of the people online, and there are also times we need the physical ones, as both are very important depending on the kind of people involved.

Thanks for reading

This is my entry to Week 191, Edition 01 of the Weekly Featured contest in Hive Learners Community

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