I have recently had a friendship come apart. It died from neglect and I admit complicity in its demise. I get too focused on things. I don’t water the flowers as much as I should. I tend to assume that, once I have had a meeting of minds with someone and a level of affection has been established, silence shouldn’t change those alliances. And yet it does – clearly it does.
In the absence of frequent interaction, in the vacuum of digital silence, this person found a way to reconstruct me as a ‘keeper of playthings’. I became, in her mind, a cold, malevolent and manipulative puppet mistress. Now, I’m a lot of things – some of them not very pleasant – but I’m just not coordinated enough to fit the bill. Plus, of all the sins I commit, dehumanizing people is not one of them. So I know that in the absence of regular communication and interaction, this person has rewritten me as a monster.
We all have this propensity, I think, for filling in when we don’t have data. The ability to do it is essential to being a good reader. No narrative can describe everything. There are always gaps and holes we, as readers, need to fill in with our own imaginations. This is what makes reading interactive and is at the heart of a real engagement with the text.
So this experience has brought up many questions for me.
It has caused me to look at my own constructions of people in the absence of regular communication. I think I tend to rewite them as stronger and more independent and less in need of my company. I worry that they have forgotten me, or moved on to more interesting acquaintances. Or I imagine their lives to be fuller and a lot more interesting than mine. I often assume they have simply written me off as ‘odd’ and ‘uncomfortable’ or simply too fucked up to maintain a relationship with. I get sad. I feel rejected.
It says much more about me than it says about them, doesn’t it? It speaks volumes to my fears and who I think I am, rather than what they think of me or who they are.
The other thing it got me thinking about was digital silence, and how much more profound we think it to be. Having never met these friends face to face, do we fear that we are more disposable? I have real life friends who I don’t communicate with for years, and yet when we meet, I don’t get the sense that we have built up all sorts of fictional motives or attributes in each other. Living as far off the beaten track as I do, I have many friendships that aren’t watered as frequently as they should be, and yet I don’t assume I’m disposable to them.
Are online friendships, by their nature, more tentative and ephemeral? And what does that say about persona and its fragility?
When I meet a person face to face, I don’t assume I know everything about them. There is a lot they cannot or will not show me. And yet I don’t suspect them of hiding things. I assume that I will come to know them better in the fullness of time. We trust our reading of people so implicitly in the real world, but here… here are so riven with doubt. And why? What basis do we actually have for that bias.
This experience has brought up more questions than answers. But it has reminded me what monsters we can make of each other in the absence of communication. And what suspicion and doubt, even when communication has been re-established, can linger. We are all convincing character writers. Once we’ve scripted someone as a villain, it becomes incredibly hard to re-evaluate that characterization, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
So… how do you re-create people in the vacuum of their absence? What does it say about them, or about you? Have you been rewritten in your absence? Do tell.
I don’t really understand what would make someone come to that particular conclusion about you. It has happened to me as well. I am an awful correspondent, I only really talk to a very few people regularly because I am weird and shy. I was pretty stunned and hurt when I was informed how awful I was being.
I don’t usually rewrite or imagine something has caused a lack of communication. I think that is mainly because of how strange about that sort of thing I know I am.
I think in a way that’s the point. That particular conclusion doesn’t say much about me. It says a lot about the other person and what they fear. I think perhaps we make monsters in our own image.
I think I’m my own monster. I was thinking about this and I tend to think I’m the monster I’ve made up thus should not be talking to people. I have issues though. Clearly.
Yeah, me too.
I can only assume by the silence that I have been rewritten, not in my absence, but in his. Sudden rejection without explanation leads me to believe that the person I thought was a friend now hates me. His opinion of me has to have changed from the positive ways he described me for months, or why wouldn’t he want to talk to me now? I have reconstructed what he thinks of me as someone unlikeable.
Do you think the difference in the level of trust comes from words typed without definition of intention, be it sincerity, sarcasm, humor, etc. versus face to face communication and the subconscious interpretation of, not just the words being spoken, but body language, tone of voice, the ability to look the other person in their eyes as they speak? I often misunderstand written communications, especially 140 character tweets.
You definitely have raised many intriguing questions regarding online relationships.
Truthfully, I’ve always thought we trust those face to face things more than we should. I think they can be equally misleading, equally misunderstood.
I’d like to think that it was harder to lie to someone when you look them straight in the eye, but my experience tells me otherwise. There are very few truly malevolent people in the world, and many more cowards. And it’s just as easy to pretend to your face as it is to lie to you online.
It is unfortunate and sad when a friendship ends badly. I suppose it is human nature to assume the worst, instead of hoping for the best, when silences lengthen and yawn between us.
I am a number of things to a number of people, so I cannot really say what goes on in my leaving-for-a-time, not-calling-for-a-bit and tardy email replies. I do not mean any harm by it; I expect that when I catch up with a friend again, we will both have fun stories to share. That expectation is inherent in my friendships. It is part of what makes face/face friendships so great; we have tactile memories to give us comfort and help us weather the absence, when friends are not near.
Our digital world asks a lot of us, more than many can deliver consistently. It is like having a power line jacked straight into your brain, connecting you in such a strong way to others. It helps to unplug it and walk away for a bit but sometimes, people get bruised and hurt in the process.
I hope that we we all will be a bit kinder to those that we know only in cyberspace and give them the same benefit of the doubt as we do our “regular” friends.
You make a good point about the digital world asking a lot.
Your description of how you construct others in the absence of information is almost precisely what I feel in those situations. And it’s fascinating that this doesn’t happen in non-virtual relationships. I think it’s because the physical is sticky; text is not. Meaning that the physical presence of someone brings with it so much “information” — more, I think, than we really know — that it inheres in some way within us.
The other day I wanted to send a birthday gift to an online friend and I had this shocking realization that, while I feel very close to her, I have absolutely no fucking idea of very simple things such as whether she likes tea or coffee. Two minutes of watching the way someone moves is worth a lifetime of texting. Presence impresses upon us some lasting connection. Call it a scent, a taste, but no matter how close you get online, you can’t get that. And so, from this alone, I think the connection more easily dissipates without regular watering. That watering can is much emptier than we think — we pour out what feels a gallon, but only a few drops get across. Delicious, essential drops, but still.
Fascinating questions you raise!
– David
You’ve made so many good points I don’t know where to start. But yeah, reality is sticky.
Sometime in my twenties I lost touch with someone I thought of as a really good friend, we both moved house, changed phones & such. Remember that this was pre-Internet and pre-mobile days! Twenty years later, I got a phone call out of the blue – and immediately recognised her voice. We chatted, catching up, but the *feeling* was that of talking to someone I’d last seen a couple of days ago.
OTOH I’m the one who would (and has) completely forgotten about someone. It’s not that I ‘re-write their story’ in the absence of contact… they just fade away.
So in the last few years I’ve begun making a conscious effort to communicate with friends, family, and people in general. I *think* it helps.
People go blank for spaces, die some inside, churning the gears of the cement mixer, the wheel is clogged, sliding further without reprieve into emptiness.
I’m a serial friendship-ist. I go into a friendship pretty much with the assumption that we only have a short time together before one of us changes too much to sustain the connection. Sometimes the connection is wider than others, so it takes some time before the signal fades, but I pretty much always expect it to.
Now that I’m getting older, though, my friendships are changing. I’ve accepted that I can only sustain a few strong friendships at a time, and I let the rest lapse. That doesn’t mean i don’t feel affection for them, simply that the resources are not available to give them more watering. But I think they’ve passed into the realm of aquaintances now.
I agree that when a question of moral character comes up in the dissolution of a friendship, it says a lot more about the person uttering the accusation than the one who it was about. I myself tend to find that if people are still in the same static state as when I left them; no change, no new thoughts to report, etc, then surely there’s no point in checking in that frequently.
So I project the same vulnerability to my own friends; I think that if I haven’t got anything interesting to say or report, I might as well just keep quiet.
Interesting, very interesting to me as this is something I’ve been pondering lately too. For me, any reconstruction of me or a relationship I’m in, or indeed construction in the first place, takes place in the other person’s mind entirely, I bear no responsibility for how I am perceived by others; however… I bear all and every responsibility for how I treat another person. I don’t see relationships as happening independently of myself, or of any of the people who make & maintain (or not) them. You and I form the relationship we have, but, it also takes on a life of its’ own and we need to give it the relational equivalent of air and light and food and water or it will die – in this context inaction is also action, I believe. Human emotion, & therefore relating & relationships, are far more complex than nurturing a plant, we come with so much baggage, programmes and patterns of behaviour built up over a lifetime, for good and for ill, that to view a relationship, any relationship, as not needing feeding is a mistake, I think. Without nurture some, not all, relationships will die, unfortunately the only question is how much blood there’ll be & how badly it’ll scar….. {{{hugs}}}
I forgot one little bit…
I think in terms of digital based relationships, ones that haven’t materialised into physicality yet or may never do so, the blanks that are sometimes filled in are where the problems arise, for me anyway and I see it in others too. We have less information to go on, less cues be they voice, visual, touch etc and as humans these are the cues we NEED in order to frame interactions and relationships with others in our own minds. Not having the cues we need leaves gaps, those gaps are unfillable in the absence of physical company, they cannot be occupied by anything else and consequently there is a temptation to fill them in with our own past experiences, we revert to type in terms of our experiences of people – if we’ve felt let down and used in the past that is what we will fill the gap with, if we’ve felt solid & secure that is what we fill the gap with etc etc. So, what fills that gap tells us much about the person doing the filling and not a whole lot about the other person; however, as I said in my previous comment, inaction is also an action, not communicating or not communicating about specific subjects in a relationship is in actual fact still communicating something, one can’t know what that is without asking, but, one can ask and not get a response….. it’s tempting in that event, and for some people very easy, to ‘fill’ this gap with their own expectations, thoughts, experiences and fears.
In digital relationships so much communication depends upon only one method of communicating and as humans this is not how we’re hard wired to communicate, it’s missing 99.99% of every other way we communicate as a species – I think we need to remember this in our interactions and adjust our expectations accordingly.
I suggest that, when one doesn’t see “face-to-face” friends for months or even years, it is somehow implicitly understood that that is okay because it’s just not that easy. Friends may live many miles or countries apart and don’t expect to see one another very frequently. If one is not in the habit of ‘phoning or e-mailing such friends, long gaps between meetings without communication are not perceived as slights, but as normality.
The thing about online friends is that they are mostly so easy to communicate with, so available. One of the consequences of this is that is they can very quickly feel that one is ignoring them if a break in communication occurs, even for just a week or a few days. Online silence can have a hurtful quality that physical separation more rarely does, because of its apparently avoidable nature. This can happen with face-to-face friends when they live sufficiently close to feel that the other person could easily make contact and visit them.
So it could be argued that hurt and resentment at failure to communicate are more or less inversely proportional to the ease with which communication can take place. It’s about feeling that someone isn’t making the effort with you.
BUT the onus to communicate surely must apply equally to both parties and so hurt and resentment can only be valid for someone who has made every effort to communicate themselves.
Fascinating topic. As someone who has moved a lot (as in, a LOT), and works from home, largely online, most of my work relationships as well as my friendships are written, and a good number are with people I’ve never met.
I think my personal traps with written correspondents are to assume that things are better than they are, that they’re fine when perhaps they’re not. In the absence of notification, I blithely assume everything must be OK. My rewriting, therefore, is on the optimistic side, but not necessarily any more accurate for that.
I find too that different parts of myself get more expression when the friendship is solely written (as opposed to those friendships where I have met the person, but now we communicate mostly in writing). It simply *is* different (for me), the writing-only; and I value it immensely. I’m older than email, so I used to be a prolific letter-writer–but I never did the “penpal” thing, even as a child, never wrote physical letters to a person whom I hadn’t met. This type of written-only friendship then is new to me. (And I will admit to missing the thrill of the arrival of a paper letter!)
David’s points above really spoke to me. Yes, in writing we do miss all those pragmatic and proxemic cues, the tone of voice, the gestures, the facial expressions. No amount of writing is going to equal that. Yet I value too those parts of me that come out (I think) only in writing. Fortunately, I don’t have to choose, and I maintain now both in-the-flesh and written friendships.
A few years ago I had a good friend and online colleague die unexpectedly. It fell to me to notify a number of her online acquaintances that her family wouldn’t possibly have known how to contact. Still now I meet people from time to time who simply didn’t know anything had happened. A few years of online silence, after all, doesn’t necessarily “mean” that the person is angry or doesn’t want to be friends anymore or even has died. How would you know?
So now when I travel to “unsettled” places, I leave with a friend not only my expected return date, but a list of email addresses of people I would wish to know “what happened,” who might not be contacted in any other way, or have any other way of finding out (I mean, who spends every day googling every person they haven’t heard from in a few months?). It’s a weird feeling, but … I’m not sure how else to handle it.
Yes, your last paragraph is a little eerie, but I have done the same. There is one person who has a list of people to notify should I, for some reason, not be likely to go online again.
Re-written in absence? About 15 years ago I met a friend in the street and we fell into conversation that ended in a cafe even though neither of us really had the time – it was more important than life in that moment. My friend had another with them, a friend of theirs but unknown to me. I’ll cut to the chase – after an hour of catching up this other person suddenly realised who I was – he had heard of me even though we’d never met or spoken. As we shook hands all round in parting he said to me ‘d’you know it’s been delightful to meet you…you’re not at all like people say you are…’… at that point their lift arrived and they were gone. In all these years I never have found out what ‘people’ said about me…how annying is THAT?
I’ve read your work for years and for a while we corresponded. We don’t so much now – busy busy I guess! But I find your writing delightful and I don’t consider you any less of a friend just because we’re not in touch every 5 minutes…
Very hard on yourself RG, please don’t be. Friendship is like love; it isn’t conditional – it just is. Take care now. Albion.
My own insecurities are an expert author of angsty stories to fill the void of a friend’s absence, fretful narratives of mistrust. I’m learning to let their absence be about them, and to care for them and love them through it. It isn’t easy for me. And sometimes they do go away for good, and it is heartbreaking.
One friend in particular needs to retreat and return, and retreat and return again. This used to scare and hurt me. But it’s just her way, how she moves through this world, how she is with those she loves. Why shouldn’t I love that, along with everything else that she is? She never fails to come back with some rich gift. She has taught me to show my love for her by waiting, patient, trusting, expectant.
I think you describe this perfectly, though I tend to feel that it really doesn’t just apply to relationships online, but relationships in general. I can think of a few online friendships (although I have met a couple of them in person) I’ve had. that have faded away. I can understand that while I liked those people, that was not enough to sustain the relationship, because we didn’t quite mesh.
In regards to offline relationships, I’ve had quite a few that have ended by way of, as you put it, being reconstructed. I put it down to a couple of things: often you never really can truly know someone and their motivations (as much as you think you might know them), and sometimes our expectations of people to understand and know us are too high. You can often spell things out for people, only to have them thrown back in your face later on.
When things like this occur, of course our knee-jerk reaction, (well often mine) is to wonder what it is you have done to cause this or cause those sorts of feelings etc. However, (and this is not to say that we are blameless) when the other party reacts in such a hostile manner, it really brings to mind the question of their character, and what is either going on their lives or what has happened to them that has made them react in such a way. Are you really all those things, or is this the result of something deeper? Perhaps their own insecurities or inability to deal with or handle certain things? I am sure that at times we have all been guilty of projecting and in our own minds, making people into things they simply are not.
In my own situations I often wondered if much of it was my fault, afterall – how many times can something reoccur before you begin to question your contribution it? (Being constructed as person you know you are certainly not is one thing but to treated as someone who deserves the full brunt of cowardly, anonymous actions and vicious rumours for no other reason than someone being angry at you, can take its toll.) I count myself lucky to have a few friends that truly do see me for the person I believe I am, without the constant reassurance and bridge building, but this is not to say that some nurturing is not required.
In my own constructions nowadays, I try to be more diplomatic. (It’s always easy to feel sorry for oneself [and I’ve been plenty guilty of this] and privately when you are a little sad or down, allow how others treat you, to dictate your worth or self-esteem.) I also draw the line in regards of what I’m willing to tolerate and try to understand my own failings in regards to my past choices and decisions.
“sometimes our expectations of people to understand and know us are too high”
Yes, this is so true.
I think we fill in attributes on people that we meet in real life as well.
I have been rewritten in person & in net interactions. Sadly it makes me feel I am lacking something when I seem to ‘lose’ one of my online friends. Like there is some witticism I forgot or a spark that I let die 🙁 I try to make a point to keep typing people but do admit to frustration when I try & try to not get any response after a month leads me to believe they are no longer available or no longer wanting to continue.
My worst fear is abandonment so I suppose I am guilty of believing people to get sick of me or being too clinging causing them to run. *blush*
That must of been unpleasant for you. It is true friendship is like a garden but it takes more than one person to keep it blooming.
Perhaps it is easier to be distrustful of online as it is easier to place on or remove those personas than it is in person 🙂
This is so fascinating. The other day, I reached out to an old friend whom I hadn’t spoken to in years, and she coldly turned down my greeting. It’s been really bothering me and I was (and still sort of am) convinced that I wasn’t good enough and that I didn’t do well enough to leave a lasting good impression.
My heart literally skipped a beat when I started to read your post about (what I interpret to be) a very similar situation.
It means so much to me to have read your thoughts on this, and you inspired me to call up another friend and “water” the friendship.
No one wants to think that they are bad friends.
Thanks for the post. This one was particularly special to me.
Re-written in my absence?
I’ve been re-written in my presence.
Have you ever had a lover go crazy – or maybe go, just… bad? You look back at what you were recently so sure of and you wonder, Was I making that up? Was he really there with me? Wait- but, how could he Not be? Is it even possible to be mistaken about something so…
and it’s like vertigo. You feel everything sway. Not from insecurity, but from the effort of pushing your understanding.
But understanding only works on things that make sense.
You’re right. What we believe says more about us. What they believe says more about them. And even with humor and intelligence and sensitivity- even with good faith and our evolutionarily fine-tuned ability to read each other face-to-face, even with everything, they can re-write you.
All I can say is that we desire evolution … evolving can hurt.