Am I better online than IRL?
My best girlfriends all live in Greater Boston, but these days we see each other face to face about once a year. My favorite co-worker and I have met in person twice. And I recently spent several confused minutes trying to place a fellow school council member on the playground; I’d only seen her online, from the shoulders up. Yet these relationships are thriving via group chats and video meetings, marked by some of the most honest and vulnerable conversations of my adult life. With three years of being extremely online behind me, it’s time to face the facts: I might be better on a screen than in real life.
This discovery isn’t totally surprising — I’m known among my friends as an introvert, much happier in an intimate conversation than at a gathering of any size. And as a lifelong reader and writer, I’m quick to take in written information and ready to reply just as fast. The group Zooms my friends and family scheduled in the early days of COVID exhausted me, but the group texts kept me sane, relieved by contact with the world that didn’t require me to look or act as though things were fine.
Still, I’m unsettled by this self-awareness. My work, relationships, and workouts may be largely virtual, but I’m not eager to keep them that way forever.
Pre-pandemic, a preference for online communication was considered strictly juvenile. In 2018, even amid concerns about adolescent anxiety and cyberbullying, Common Sense Media reported that teens preferred texting to face-to-face communication. Fast forward to fall 2021 and a Pew Research Center study revealed that more US adults used texting and group chats to stay connected throughout COVID than used other technologies like phone calls, video chats, or social media. Notably, while 44 percent of adults identified messaging and group chats as the primary technology that helped them stay connected, that number was 49 percent among women — a great many of whom took on stressful, draining caregiving responsibilities over the course of the pandemic.
My own experience reflects this. I’m closer to my girlfriends now than ever before, even though we’ve known one another since our late teens. I also developed new relationships, scaffolded by a tower of digital messages crisscrossing back and forth.
Pre-pandemic, I’d been near-friends with two women who lived in my neighborhood, all of us with children the same age; we were proximate but hadn’t quite crossed the boundary into friendship territory. But in those first weeks we began texting one another unguardedly, blasting past the early stages of connection and launching full steam into our fear and boredom and need. We haven’t stopped the conversation since, especially now that we no longer live near one another and can’t make impromptu plans.
I also started a new job in 2021 with a largely remote workforce, and I spend most of the day in online chats and meetings. I have quite a few co-workers I might not recognize if I ran into them on the street. I have no idea how tall anyone is. But in our remote-work world, I know their work styles and senses of humor, their pets, houseplants, and pictures that line the walls behind them. When you can communicate about deadlines using the vomiting face emoji, it’s easy to lower the walls of self-consciousness that slow the growth of relationships.
Is it perfect? Of course not. I’m not a machine, and I do miss human connection. A few weeks ago, when a friend texted that she was free for dinner that evening if anyone could get away, I jumped at the chance to meet up. The experience of sharing from each other’s plates and laughing at jokes face to face was 10 times more of a mood boost than texting recipes and punctuating our conversations with the iMessage “ha ha” bubble.
I’ve also gotten bolder and more creative when it comes to building in-person relationships: After a few false starts with a training app, I signed up for a women’s running group this spring, with both online checkins and weekly in-person runs. For weeks, I followed the online workouts but was too nervous to join a group run. What if I was too slow, or too sweaty, or just plain awkward in all the ways that happen in real life?
I finally summoned some of the vulnerability that
I’ve allowed into my virtual conversations and showed up early one Saturday morning. I was slow, I was sweaty, and I spent the first 10 minutes desperately wanting to go home. But then another runner hung back to keep pace with me. We ended up talking for nearly an hour as we ran — and by the end of it, I’d run my best pace yet.
I may always be a bit more confident and competent online, and that’s OK, given how much of my day is still spent on Teams meetings and group chats. These days, I’m starting to understand that IRL me isn’t so bad either. I just have to get back in the habit of letting her show up.