No matter how the current era will come to justify it, the fading away of physical friendship with the presence of online friendship is not something everyone should give applause to. This is my personal opinion. The importance of immediate and physical friendship can't be kicked away. Imagine if one is having a wedding ceremony and all the friends of the couple are online friends who are not in the country; it would look very odd not to have friends around on such a day. The same happens when one is mourning and the friends who are supposed to sympathise with and comfort the person are all virtual friends and are out of the country. No matter how one tries to be comforted by the words sent online, the person still needs the physical presence of their friends.
I think the two sides of making friends should be balanced, and even though the balance may not always be visible, the two sides should be able to be felt instead of completely discarding the idea of making friends in the real world.
Honestly, I'm a victim of this, but I've been trying to match up.
If we look at it critically, the current trend in the world makes it easier to make and keep friends online when compared to the real-world process.
In my street, a lot of people look at me and conclude that I don't make friends with people in the street; that's why I always live on my own and hardly have people in our street coming around to stay and gist. Yeah, I sometimes feel the need to have people around me as they rally around others in the street, but then, my online world is where I have uncountable friends, where they make me no longer see the need to make physical friends.
As it stands, I have just one guy whom I lived with in the same compound before we packed out, as the only person I call a friend who visits me and whom I visit as well. The other people in my life don't get to come to my house except on a very rare note; we only maintain the friendship whenever we see each other and also online. The fact is, the idea of many friends coming around to choke me in my space gives me a headache. This is why I prefer online friends to physical friends, except in situations where the physical friendship does not require frequent visits.
Like I said earlier, no matter how private we want to be, in one way or the other, we need the physical presence of family members or friends in our lives. We can't totally depend on virtual friends, as the world is currently pushing us to.
Just like the way I've been doing it, one can make good friends in the real world (physical friends) and still keep boundaries in terms of unwanted and rampant visitations and also shutdown doors for unnecessary jealousy. I have a lot of church people as friends; we get along very well, and we talk online often too, but when it comes to visitations, there's always a boundary. I know some people may want to say that this friendship is not 100% genuine. Well, that's for you because, as for me, these people are down to my heart but we have boundaries.
Thanks for reading.
Photo: Own photo.
