My best friend lives in Arizona.
While I like to consider a number of people here at SU my friends, there are very few people here that I can really say I know all too well. The fact of the matter is that I've been somehting of a hermit the past year and a half or so and my friendships in real life have suffered for it. I have not gotten to meet very many new people or spend time with many people in person.
However, I do spend a lot of time online. And online was where I met my best friend, Adam.
Adam lives in Arizona, so the fact that he's nowhere near me suggests that not every aspect of attraction (in this case proximity) is necessary to achieve a long lasting friendship. (Latane et al., 1995) However, the amount of time I spent online and the fact that he is online most of the time I am does mean that the mere exposure effect likely had a play in our friendship (Kuntz-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980). It certainly had a hand in us meeting for the first time when we both tended to join in with another mutual friend of ours in a chatroom at the same time a great many times.
But the biggest basis for our friendship is just how similar we are (Montoya et al., 2008). Adam and I are damn near the exact same person in a lot of ways. We are both artistic and enjoy sci-fi and fantasy. We both loe to draw and to write. We both love comics, video games, and cartoons but aren't too fond of Japanese Anime. Prety much everything that I like, he likes and vice versa.
However, at one point, our friendship almost fell through. And that was the one time we found something different, and it was a big one. I really hate how we keep coming back to the concept of religion buuuuuuut...
Turns out Adam is a Presbyterian Christian; a very faithful one at that. And the one time religion came up and I mentioned that I was agnostic and I started to explain some of my views on religion, we got into a heated argument very quickly. If we had not quickly just stepped back and both said "stop" to ourselves, and gone on to agree to disagree with one another on this matter, it is likely we would have ended our friendship right there. Luckily we were both mature enough to let this slide pretty quickly and we have been close internet-buddies ever since. Goes to show you that opposites really DON'T attract.
Though I have never met him in person, from vid-chats and text chats, as well as the amount of time we have just spent talking, I can safely say that Adam is one of the only people I would really trust with my life. I am arranging to meet with him this Spring and we hope to go into business together once I get out of college.
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Resources:
Kuntz-Wilson, W., & Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Affective discrimination stimuli that cannot be recognized. Science, 207, 557-558.
Latane, B., Liu, J. H., Nowak, A., Bonevento, M., & Zheng, L. (1995). Distance matters: Physical space and social impact. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 795-805.
Montoya, R. M., Horton, R. S., & Kirchner J. (2008). Is actual similarity necessary for attraction? A meta-analysis of actual and perceived similarity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25, 889-922.
I think its really cool that you were able to connect with someone that way through a social medium that is often used to keep one's identity ambiguous. Although you are not near each other in physical space I think that yall are still pretty close proximity of one another with the internet, when you think about it thats kind of closer than some people here on campus are, like I dont know any of the people who live around me and they are literally right there. I think the concept of proximity could be expanded in this situation, because now-a-days you can almost always keep in contact with someone using cellphones or internet, I think its more about how willing the two people are to reciprocate that communication. I hope this guy is the person he is online and that you aren't meeting up with a creeper, not offense just for your safety you know there are some crazy people in this world. But good luck in yalls future endeavors!
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