Sweet sweat

It occurred to me today that blogging relationships are a lot like real life.

You put your opinions, your thoughts, your feelings, your activities and your photos 'out there' and proceed within the reaction you get. Depending on how 'out there' you are, you find readers (= acquaintances), you get 'comments' (acknowledgement that you exist, your ideas/thoughts have some value or strike a chord with that person), some acquaintances keep hanging around and make more comments (overtures towards friendship), some nod hello (make one comment) then disappear back into their own lives, some make more effort and continue to comment. You visit their blogs in return. Some of them seem nice people but you don't think you have much in common with them so you visit infrequently. Some of them seem interesting, so you visit fairly often - occasionally your interest is reciprocated and they keep visiting you. Sooner or later you end up with one or two people you enjoy reading daily, keeping up with their lives becomes part of your own and you have made a blog friend - just as you might make a 'real' friend.

But, beware, there are a few anomalies that make 'blog friends' not quite like 'real friends'.

First, they are pretty much anonymous. Oh they might use their real name. If you are clever with the internet you might even be able to track down their address or where they work - they might even tell you these things. But essentially, unless you are some kind of psychopath, you probably don't want to intrude on them if they wish to terminate the 'friendship' - so if they stop blogging, you've essentially lost a friend. This kind of loss can be almost as devastating as losing a 'real' friend.

Now I'm a bit of a trusting sucker. I got hooked on blogging and it suited me. A way to talk to people and be part of the 'real' world without having to leave the security of my own space. Didn't have to dress up. Didn't have to lay off the wine in order to drive home. Didn't have to put up with boring conversations with people that didn't interest me. No... none of that for me - I'd found blogging.

My first "blog friend" was a woman from the USA. I can't quite remember how we found each other but she was a lovely friend. She blogged every day. She even joined an online group I suggested and we shared long emails. As well as me, she began emailing another member of the group who coincidentally was a correspondent of mine. I even asked for her address and sent her a parcel in the mail.

As well as blogging every day, the thing this woman did was a kind of blog-touting. She commented every day, not just on my site but on many of the hundreds of links she quickly built up, and guess what, her friendly manner and caring commenting scored her hundreds of followers. I reckon in less than 6 months she was consistently achieving 20 comments a day on her blog.

Then she basically stopped blogging. Within a period of a month, her posts had dried to a trickle and then pretty much stopped altogether. Her life changed I know, she got a job, she got pregnant...but it amazed me, how she could go from deliberately building up a whole community of friends, to total neglect of and disinterest in them.

I was in awe at the effort and time she used to put into blogging; and terribly disappointed when she just disappeared. That's the thing with blog friends, they don't have to explain or complain, they can just disappear.

Then I found another good blog friend. We commented back and forth, we got to know each other -I thought. She didn't have a large community of acquaintances, she seemed to develop a few close blog friends. But her posts didn't just dry to a trickle - one day they just stopped and her blog disappeared completely - wiped from the memory of the www. I managed to re-find her and we started emailing each other. There was a lot of important stuff about this blog friend I never learned from her blog but we became even better friends - I thought. Then she stopped answering my emails. She never commented any more on my blog. She disappeared a second time.

Now I have another good blog friend but his posts are drying up. He doesn't write as often as he did. Maybe he's just going through a bad patch, or maybe it's something inherent in blogging. Maybe blogging is just a place for people who can't or don't want to expose themselves to friendships in the real world. Maybe it's a community of lost souls, people with real life problems they neither want to examine nor share and who simply reach out to a community where you can be anyone you want to be and make friends or acquaintances right across the world and never have to talk to anyone when you don't feel like talking or make dinner for another person, or give up your precious free time when you don't feel like it. Maybe you can't make real friends in blogland.

A different type of blogger is the one who essentially blogs for the friends they already have. There's a community of 6 or 8 friends going on here. They chat, they speak the same language, they know the same people, they have the same interests. These bloggers often have links headlines such as 'people I spy on'. I wish I was this sort of blogger. I'd love to be anonymously catching up on the thoughts and doings of people I know but unfortunately, I don't know many bloggers personally.

Mind you knowing that people you know in the 'real world' are reading your blog is quite inhibiting as well. You have to be careful that your words don't offend them. Sometimes they can even be put out by the relationship you have with other bloggers.

It's a whole new community and the rules seem to be pretty fluid - no etiquette books here - but for all its limitations, I'll still take the intimacy of blogging and the sheer selfish pleasure of it over making 'real' friends most of the time.

Guess by my reasoning here that must make me a selfish social misfit.

Oh well; I just wanted to explore these thoughts and you dear blog acquaintance/friend are the perfect person to spill them to.