Online friendships, not romance#

"Just friends" is a funny phrase. As if friendship were the disappointing outcome. We attempted something worthwhile, but unfortunately all we got was a person who understands us and wants us to be happy.

A good platonic friendship is an extraordinary thing. Someone you can be silly with. Someone who remembers what you were worried about last week. Someone who can disagree with you, sometimes quite strongly, and still care how your day went.

We don't need to apologise for wanting more of that. And online friendship doesn't need to be a waiting room for romance to count.

A window into someone else's life#

One of the things I love about the idea of meeting strangers online is how unlikely some of those meetings are.

Offline, circumstance does a lot of the choosing. You meet colleagues, neighbours, friends of friends. There's nothing wrong with that, but it can leave whole kinds of people outside your experience.

A chat can cross some of those gaps. Someone lives in a place you've only seen in the news. Someone has a job you didn't know existed. Someone believes something that seems completely baffling to you, and is also funny, kind, and very worried about their cat.

Now what? Do you discard the person because one of their opinions doesn't fit? Or get curious?

This is a large part of why I work on Wusoup. I'd like more of us to have the chance to discover that people outside our usual circles are, well, people. Complicated and imperfect and often lovely.

A friendship can start with a shared interest. It doesn't have to stay within the things you already share.

Friendship without a next step#

There's a particular ease in knowing a conversation isn't an audition for anything.

You can enjoy someone's company without asking whether you'd date them. You can learn about their life without checking it against a list of partner requirements. You can be fond of someone whose circumstances would make a romantic relationship wildly impractical. They're on the other side of the planet? Fine. Tell me what breakfast looks like over there.

Of course people can form perfectly good friendships in places that also allow dating. The difficulty comes when you keep meeting people who treat your stated wish for friendship as an obstacle to get around.

And the design can encourage exactly that. Take a dating app's photo-first browsing and swiping, write "friends!" on the label, and leave the rules vague about flirting. Why would the behaviour suddenly change? A friendship label doesn't do much if everything underneath still invites people to treat each other as potential dates.

That's why Wusoup has an enforced no-dating rule. It gives this one kind of connection a place to breathe. I've written about the practical side in chat without dating.

Does it count if you've never met?#

Yes. You still need to get to know each other, and a screen doesn't make that instant. But being physically distant doesn't make the care imaginary.

If you remember their interview and ask how it went, that matters. If they make you laugh on a difficult day, that matters too. A friendship conducted in words can become part of your ordinary life, just as pen pals have been for generations.

There are things an online friend can't easily do. They probably can't help you move a sofa. You may never get to have a cup of tea in the same room. It's okay to miss those things without deciding the friendship is somehow less real.

And it doesn't have to become profound to be worthwhile. A friendly chat that makes an otherwise miserable Tuesday a little nicer is already doing something good.

Making room for it#

If you'd like more online friendships, give them some room in your week. Write first sometimes. Follow up. Share something that made you think of the other person. Leave space for the chat to wander.

Also leave space for the person to surprise you. It's tempting to search for someone who checks every box, but some of the best reasons to know a person won't fit in a profile.

For practical places to start, here's how to make friends online as an adult. My own attempt is Wusoup: free, 1-on-1 text chat for adults 19+, with strict rules about kindness, honesty, and effort.

It's a small experiment in a thing I think we need more of. People making time for each other, without needing anything else to come of it.