wavefreak58 wrote:
I interact with a lot more people online but how can I call them friends? I have trouble making a genuine personal connection with my wife and kids, let alone people online. I VALUE my online contact with people. But I can't see this as equivalent to friendship.
It depends on how broad your definition of friend is. To me, a friend is anyone more intimate than an acquaintance. Wendy Lawson has a diagram in her book "Friendships: The Aspie Way" that shows how there are different levels of friendship and different kinds of friends. If you define friendship so that only a best friend/bosom buddy is a friend, then no, I don't have online friends. But if you use a more broad definition like Lawson and acknowledge that there are different kinds of friends and different layers of friendship then, yes, I have a good handful of friends online.
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