The Internet has made it so much easier to connect with people, especially for those who aren't particularly confident in social situations or who have busy lives and don't have the time to meet new people. Online you are able to create a more confident, likeable persona and interact with people who have similar interests and beliefs as you. There are dating and friendship sites, as well as chat rooms and forums. It only takes one exchange of messages between you and another person for you to find yourself making friends and potentially more. However, is it really worth investing your time into such relationships?
The answer depends on what you expect to get out of your online relationships. Do you accumulate online 'friends' for the purpose of extending your business contacts – finding people with similar interests in order to promote a particular product or service? Do you try to make friends with people so that you have something other than junk mail to read when you open your inbox? Perhaps you like getting to know people and genuinely get some satisfaction from learning about what people do with their time. It could be that you want more than friendship and hope to develop the relationship offline as well as on.
You also have to consider what the other person concerned wants. You may really enjoy exchanging messages with someone and really want to meet up in person, only to find out that the other person just wants to exchange dirty messages and have a bit of online fun. There is no point building your hopes up that the relationship could become something more if it's not what the other person wants. Thus, there is a danger that you could get too involved with someone and discover that the relationship means more to you than the person you exchange messages with. You could end up wasting months of your time interacting with someone, when you could have been communicating with someone else more serious about meeting up.
It is also important to be aware that not everyone is who they say they are online. Of course, the same can be said of people in 'real' life, too; not everyone tells the truth. However, the Internet gives you a sense of anonymity that you don't get in person, and it becomes easier to exaggerate a little bit here and tell a few white lies there, so that you think you know someone when you really don't have a clue. You build them up in your mind and when you finally do meet, you're disappointed.
Overall, if you spend a lot of time at the computer and just want an online companion to exchange messages with, then you can get quite a lot out of online relationships. However, ultimately, online relationships are never quite as satisfying as the real thing, and so there may come a point where you have to decide whether to bring your online relationship offline. Sometimes, this isn't always possible, though, especially when the person you're corresponding with lives so far away. Consequently, it may be worth weighing up whether your online relationship really means enough to you to keep investing so much time and energy into it when it may all lead to nothing.
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