5.1: Long Distance Friendship

Sonja and I have been best friends since sixth grade. For our sophomore year of high school, Sonja, being the amazing women she is, left for South Africa to study abroad for a year. Before she returned, I moved 45 minutes away, where I finished high school. We lost touch until four years ago, when I received an email from her out of the blue. Over the years Sonja and I have reconnected through email. In our correspondence we’ve shared detailed stories about our lives and discussed our goals and values, unlike we had ever done before. I am not a very sentimental person and often feel cheesy casually talking about feelings and grandiose dreams, but doing these things in an email was much more comfortable for me. Our relationship dramatically evolved, and Sonja once again became my closest friend. Because of the buffer created by email’s minimal cues and asynchronous features, I became disinhibited. The hyperpersonal model best explains my uninhibited behavior that lead to self-disclosure and depth superceding that of our previous relationship.

More recently we have started interacting via Facebook. I have found that our online interactions have slightly changed because of the features Facebook offers, namely pictures. Sonja has 515 images linked to her! And I have about 10! Seeing Sonja with new friends, a series of old boyfriends, on various trips around the world, and with family has made me realize how distant Sonja and I have really become. I know nearly no one in the pictures, I know very little about the things depicted in her travel images, and her family looks much different from the last time I saw them seven years ago. Despite our long emails, I realized that there is a lot that I don’t know about Sonja and what is going on in her life and that make feel sad (wow, that sounded cheesy!). Ultimately, this has had a negative impact on our relationship. The hyperpersonal model talks about two relevant concepts here: behavioral confirmation and self-presentation. The way Sonja was presented in her images was not entirely the same Sonja that I had come to know. I knew the intellectual and emotional side of her, and the pictures depicted her more fun, spontaneous, and social side. These things have not come across in our emails as much as they did in the pictures. Looking at them, I found myself feeling less “psychologically attracted” to her.

My new found realization of what Wallace terms common ground is one further explanation. I see, more than ever, that Sonja and I have little common ground in our social activities and less than I thought in our personal lives. McKenna’s identifiability factor also provides some insight: Learning more about Sonja through her pictures indicates a superficial lack of self-disclosure, thus causing some depenetration of the friendship. The removal of gating features, the verbal and nonverbal discomfort potentially communicated during a face-to-face interaction, has caused my feelings to remain hidden. My feelings are not be interpreted as my feeling lied to or upset with Sonja in any way, rather the connection I feel with her simply feels less strong. It’s unreasonable for me to tell Sonja about my feelings in any channel because they’re counterproductive. Telling her that I feel sad because of my realization of lack common ground will not enable her to “fix it.” Our lives have gone in different directions over the years and that’s something that I need to come to terms with, not expect Sonja to change.