The Online Friendship That Was More Real Than Most In-Person Ones

I have always been slightly embarrassed about the origin story of my friendship with Fatima, which tells me something worth examining about the social hierarchy I had imposed on how connection could legitimately form.

We met on a forum dedicated to mobile photography in 2019 when I was 26, living in Shanghai, and she was living in Kuala Lumpur. We had commented on each other's work, discovered we were both architecture graduates who had ended up in adjacent creative fields, and started a direct message conversation that was initially about photography and became, within a few months, about considerably more significant things.

Over the following two years we talked with a frequency and an honesty that I have rarely managed in face-to-face friendships, and I have thought about why. Part of it was the remove of text - the specific freedom that comes from not being physically in someone's presence, which reduces certain kinds of social performance and allows a directness that real-time facial interaction complicates.

Part of it was that the friendship had no social context - no shared friend group whose dynamics needed to be navigated, no history that required management, no ambient social pressure to perform a particular version of ourselves.

We knew each other only as we were in the conversation, which meant we were more directly and continuously ourselves than social contexts usually permit. When we met in person for the first time in Kuala Lumpur in 2021, the experience was strange in a specific way: I knew her well and did not know how she moved or how she laughed or any of the physical information we usually gather about people we are close to.

Both things were true simultaneously. The friendship in person had to incorporate her physical reality into a relationship that was already deep, rather than the other way around, which was an unusual sequence. She is one of my closest friends now, three years of occasional visits and daily messages later.

The embarrassment I felt about the origin has largely dissolved. What replaced it is a more honest understanding that the medium of a relationship is less determinative of its quality than the honesty and consistency and mutual care it contains. Those things can exist anywhere.

I found them on a photography forum and I am not embarrassed about that anymore.