Carol H Tucker Passionate about knowledge management and organizational development, expert in loan servicing, virtual world denizen and community facilitator, and a DISNEY fan
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beladona Memorial Be warned:in this very rich environment where you can immerse yourself so completely, your emotions will become engaged -- and not everyone is cognizant of that. Among the many excellent features of SL, there is no auto-return on hearts, so be wary of where your's wanders...
In the past two posts, I laid the groundwork for looking at friendships in term of:
Level of association-- how close is s/he to me?
Depth of engagement-- how much do I know about her/him and how much does s/he know about me?
Sharing-- giving and receiving support, being present
And then I talked about “real life” and “online” friends, answering the same set of questions for both:
How many friends do you have?
How long do you stay friends?
How do you make friends?
And of those friends, how many do you actually know?
And the last question to answer for the online friends: What do you expect from your friends and what can they expect from you? And when I went to answer this question, I came to a dead stop – when you come right down to it, I expect the same things from the people I know online as I do from the people I have met throughout my life if we are what I consider “friends”.
Years ago, Frank used to call the people that I chatted to online my “imaginary friends”. He kept that up even after meeting Barbara Weaver-Smith and her husband in RL. But the people I have met online are very much real people to me, not avatars, not caricatures. Names come to mind: Denham. Ward. Lavinia. Nevyn. Jared. Coke. Richard. Baron. Merry These are people that I have argued with, talked to, shared emotional experiences, come to understand something of what makes them tick – and become known to them in turn. And there is the family: Lucius. Jax. Jhardin. Tarra. Then there are the partners that I have had in SL: Revilo, Sam and Searaven. Everyone of these people have taken a place in my life
There are layers of intimacy and intensity, neh? Last night I attended a talk in SL by Ericella Sixpence on how to establish and maintain a long distance relationship [LDR]. He focused on five key elements: Desire, Effort, Compromise, Understanding, and Commitment. If all of these are present, in whatever degree of intensity you are operating on, then you have a relationship that will grow and deepen – and I see no reason to differentiate from online and RL.
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