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Online Friends: Can You Make Real Friends on The Internet

• Categories: Digital Communication Social Media Communication

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Published: Feb 9, 2023

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Online Friends Vs. Real Life Friends: A Comparison

• https://thoughtcatalog.com/?p=154907

What makes a true friendship anymore? Is it whether or not the person knows your birthday, or how many hours you spend talking on the phone or hanging out in person? With all the ways we can communicate now — Skype, ICQ, AIM, Gchat, Facebook Messenger, Grindr, etc. — and with all the people on our buddy lists, who are we really friends with? Is it possible to have friends who are purely for the Internet and others you interact with in real life? What’s the difference?

Keeping You Company

Online Friends: Online friends are people you don’t really really know but you met them once at a conference, on a social networking site, on Twitter, or maybe you added them to your Facebook because they’re friends with someone you know. Plus they’re hot, and you do enjoy collecting Facebook friends based on their hotness. An online friend is someone you know is available every time you see that little green dot next to their name, so you write them and say hello. But sometimes it’s possible to have an online best friend who you’ve never met before in real life, but who keeps you company when you’re writing a long paper or bored at work. You talk to each other at least every other day. You even have inside jokes and think about going out to visit them wherever they live, you know, to take things to the next step.

Real Life Friends: Real life friends keep you company when they can, when they’re not busy with something else or watching a favorite television show. An online friend is available whenever they have that promiscuous little green dot beside their name, but your real life friends have things to do and you don’t always know what they’re doing or when they’re busy. You can make plans with your real life friends for tea or brunch, and you can compliment them on their new haircut. Even if you talk to your real life friend online, you KNOW they’re a real friend when they are ‘invisible’ and they will still talk to you.

Gossip And Life Problems

Online Friends: Online friends know all about your relationship drama and boy/girl crushes, because you’ve been asking them for advice for months. Hey there, Google Talk friend, Should I try to kiss him tonight? OMG what do you think? You feel comfortable talking to your online friends about all of your life issues because as far as they know your name is really “Katie Smith,” even though it’s not, and you could be making up all of your social problems. Plus, you’ve already bugged your real life friends about this stuff to death. Now you have a whole new outlet!

Real Life Friends: Your real life friends know you the best and are not afraid to tell you about yourself. Sure, your online friends can offer an opinion, even a decisive one, but there is nobody like a real life friend to tell you when you need to get it together. A real life friend says things like, Don’t you already have a girlfriend? Should you really be talking to this other girl, no matter how hot she is? A real life friend will make you feel good even when you’re feeling depressed about the job market or going through a difficult period in your life. An online friend can console you, but just doesn’t have the same context.

Sexual Tension

Online Friends: Depending on the context in which you met said online friend, there might still be some unresolved sexual tension between you two that has to be dealt with. Maybe you’ve made some sexual innuendos to each other. But even if you haven’t had those kind of late night chats, if you ever do take your friendship into real life you do run the risk of having unreleased sexual tension. You feel like you should just have sex already, you know, just to get it over with. After all, you’re not really strangers so it’s not really a hook up — you’ve been friends online for like six months now. Consider it a physical Hello!

Real Life Friends: Do we really want to have sex with our real life friends? Maybe the friendship started romantically but ended up becoming sexual, or maybe our friendships started sexual and got platonic somewhere along the way. Not that there’s never sexual energy between real life friends, but it seems like sexual energy between online friends you’ve never met before is implied. Or maybe I’m just a slut.

Online Friends: With online friends you can do things like play Words With Friends or watch your favorite television show together, chatting about everything that annoys you about the show. That’s the fun part — I almost never watch TV alone now. If I’m watching a big show that everyone is talking about, like Scandal , RuPaul’s Drag Race or Homeland , I’m definitely chatting to my online friends while it’s on. Not that I don’t do that with my real life friends, too. Plus, with online friends you always have a new place to visit — sexual tension or not.

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Online Friends vs. Real Life Friends: Similarities, Differences, & What Makes Them Great

Your online friends are real friends, but there are a few ways social media friendship is different than regular life.

Kate is an experienced writer who has written hundreds of articles for publication.

Learn about our Editorial Policy .

If you're like many of us, you've made some very significant online relationships over the years. Are online friends real friends, or are they something more superficial? It completely depends on the depth of the connection and how you define a friendship.

When Is Friendship Real Online or Offline?

Back in elementary school, you probably had a simple definition of friendship: someone who was fun to play with and nice to you. As you get older, the definition gets a little more complex.

• 5 Things Need to Know Before Meeting Online Friends IRL
• 10 Real-Life Ways to Make Friends as an Introvert
• How to Make Friends in Your 30s: A Real-World Guide

Online or offline, a friendship involves choosing to meet each other's emotional needs. The American Psychological Association (APA) adds that friends often have common interests and a long-lasting relationship.

For this length and depth of connection, you need to share yourselves with each other and be open and honest. This can happen whether you're sitting face-to-face in your favorite coffee shop or dropping each other DMs on Instagram. Online friendships and real-life friendships have tons of things in common.

Real Friendships Focus on Similar Interests

It's easier to make friends with people who like the same things you do (just like it was back on the playground). Your common interest, whether it's photography, music, pets, kids, or anything else, gives you a starting point for conversations. This is true in person and online, but it can actually be easier to find people with common interests online.

Friendships Happen by Choosing to Be Together

Real friends choose to spend time together, whether that's time playing frisbee golf at the park or time chatting online. Friendship is voluntary. You're together because you want to be.

What about a work friendship where you're together for a job (remote or in person)? In this case, the choice is sharing yourselves with each other and spending time together when you're not actively involved in a work task.

Online or Offline, Real Friendships Involve Vulnerability

Just as in any relationship, friendship involves emotional risk. You're choosing to be close to someone, which means you might get hurt. This openness and vulnerability is important to deepening your bond, whether that happens on your phone or at your favorite restaurant. In some ways, it may actually be easier to share deeper parts of yourself online, but it can also feel less risky emotionally because of the distance.

Friendship Involves Emotional Support

When you're friends with someone, you can count on them to have your back when things get hard. If you're sad, stressed, going through a break-up, or dealing with a loss, the people you turn to are your friends. That's because they offer emotional support. It's just part of being good friends .

This is true of social media friends, as well as in-person friends. If you turn to one another in times of need, that's a sign of a real friendship.

• Long-Distance Friendship Quotes for Your Unbreakable Bond

Online Friends vs. Real Life Friends: How They Differ

Even though online friends can be real friends, there are some important differences between friendships where you interact through a screen and those that happen in your real life.

Online Friendships Require More Commonalities

In real life, you can share one interest (say mountain biking) and use that as a starting point for your relationship. After you do some biking, you can grab coffee and chat. The more you do that, the more shared experiences you have together to grow your friendship.

When you're friends online, it's harder to build new shared experiences together. Instead, you may need to start with several important commonalities.

• 35 Interesting Things to Talk About With Friends

It May Be Easier to Open Up With Online Friends

Because of the distance that comes with communicating through a screen, many people find it easy to open up emotionally online. That can lead to deep friendships because you're being vulnerable. At the same time, having the distance between you can also reduce some of the vulnerability and create a lack of intimacy.

Social Media Friends Can Conceal Flaws

In a real-world friendship, we can't always hide those annoying habits or dorky things we might do. On social media, on the other hand, friends can share the best details of their lives without revealing the things they'd rather not have seen. This is one of the potential disadvantages of online friends, and it means that you may not always have an accurate view of what your friends are like.

This can be too in real life as well, though, so it's best to simply use your instincts to determine how well you know your friends.

Are Online Friends Real Friends or Something Else?

Every friendship is different, but if your online friendships feel like real friendships, they probably are. Your friends on Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, or wherever you interact online can be just as significant as real life friends, and no matter how you know them, your emotional connection to your friends can be very real.

Social Media Friends vs Real-Life Friends: Is There a Difference?

I will begin with one simple question – How does someone define the term friendship?

If you ask different types of people you will get different opinions. The term friendship is a close mutual relationship between two or more people marked by feelings of care, respect, concern, or even love.

For those who experienced it, it’s a complex process and has a  huge impact on our mental health and happiness . In every stage of our lives such as childhood, adolescents, and adulthood we strive for that interactive bond making us secure and wanted.

Nowadays there are different forms of friendship including the most popular – social media friends . Real-life friends are the opposite of social media friends yet they have some things in common.

Social media friendships, for example, are built online and rely on communication tools such as social network sites, stable internet connections, and smart technology. The nature of these relationships is virtual and lacks the intimate, personal, and emotional connection of real-life friendship made offline. 

However, some would argue that hanging out with an online friend can be just as meaningful, supportive, and enjoyable as meeting a friend in person.

Furthermore, many would agree that making friends online is much easier than in the real world. There are so many reasons why making social connections and internet friends seems so much easier when we all use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. to communicate.

The most common types of people that find it easier to develop a friendship online are teens and students in primary schools. According to a lot of studies, teenagers claim that after meeting someone once in real life afterward they proceed with communication online before meeting again. With this strategy, they avoid things from getting awkward and intense and speed up the normal process with a superficial bond at first.

However, an important question needs to be asked here.

How do you recognize a true friendship?

Is it the amount of time we spend with some people on the phone or hanging out? We all have that buddy list but how to know which of them are the real ones? To make everything come to its senses, there is an excellent explanation about the differences between these two terms – social media friends or real-life friends.

I will begin with one simple question –What is the definition of friendship?

For those who experienced it, it’s a complex process and has a huge impact on our mental health and happiness . In every stage of our lives such as childhood, adolescence, and adulthood we strive for that interactive bond making us secure and wanted.

Nowadays there are different forms of friendship including the most popular – social media friends, made through social networking sites. 

Real-life friends are the opposite of social media friends yet they have some things in common.

Social media friendships, for example, are built online and rely on communication tools such as social network sites, stable internet connections, and smart technology. The nature of these relationships is virtual and lacks the intimate, personal, and emotional connection of real-life friendship made offline.

The most common types of people who find it easier to develop a friendship online are teens and students in primary schools. According to a lot of studies, teenagers claim that after meeting someone once in real life they proceed with communication online before meeting again. With this strategy, they avoid things from getting awkward and intense and speed up the normal process with a superficial bond at first.

Is it the amount of time we spend with some people on the phone or hanging out? We all have that buddy list but how to know which of them are the real ones? To make everything come to its senses, there is an excellent explanation about the differences between these two terms – social media friends and real-life friends.

Social Media friends

Social media friends are the type of people who don’t really know you as a person but you met them once on the social media platforms or maybe you added them on your Facebook account because they are friends with people you know.

One good example of online relationships is the lurker friends that don’t interact with your social media posts .

An online friend is someone available most of the time because of the advantage of social media platforms and their constant use of them at any time or anywhere. Example of online friends is Facebook friends, Snapchat friends, or TikTok friends.

Finding friends online is much easier than finding friends offline. Online friends are easy to make because you can just go to some website and there always be someone you can chat with.

For some people is likely possible to have an online “best” friend who they never met before in reality but who is always there keeping you company in your boring moments. You can talk to that kind of friend most of the time and share inside jokes such as memes that you can find on the internet .

However, when virtual friendships are made people only receive a fragment of a person, an online version of someone that only reciprocates a conversation in a given moment. Friends in person, on the other hand, allow you to experience a person fully and determine whether or not they are worth your time.

Real-Life friends

Real-life friends are the type of people you hang out with in real life. They keep you company whenever they can if they are not busy doing something else. Nowadays we live a fast life and not everyone has the time to do a lot of things in a day including seeing many people.

In offline friendships, you are face to face with a person and you can talk about different subjects such as the most important thing called private life and the difficulties one person has in some period of their time. You can also make plans like going to your favorite restaurant or on a picnic and maintain a meaningful relationship. 

The difference between social media friends and real-life ones is that online friends know all about your relationship drama because you ask for advice just about that kind of superficial stuff. Friends online are not here to support you and walk with you through the ups and downs of life.

The real-life friend knows you best and they are in the right position to tell you the truth even if it’s hurtful sometimes.

The main reason why we chose social media friends over real-life friends

Do social media friends qualify as real friendships? So far we came to a similar interpretation that online friends are easier to make.

In the digital world, there is a variety of digital platforms where a person can interact with another. The opposite of that is real friends aren’t easy to make especially in this modern world. We come to a point where we as people are afraid of being judged by other people .

Online friends are the perfect ‘friends’ for kids who live in isolated areas, kids with disabilities, or social anxiety. That online environment provides interaction with minimal risk. That’s why we choose to be protected by our computer screens and not go face-to-face.

Another reason we prefer online friendships is that they require significantly less effort, responsibility, and work to be nurtured.

Contrary to the commitment and responsibility required by our closest friends, online friendships are not as demanding and any small inconvenience can be solved under the excuse that the internet connection was interrupted.

The internet provides the opportunity to create a friendship in the blink of an eye but at the same time, there is the security of the block button if things are going in the wrong direction.

Social networks serve as a buffer against inappropriate situations and conflicts that appear between people who interact online.  All this seems so convenient but also it takes away the people skills that they need in real life. 

Face-to-face interactions and resolving conflicts in person are more respectful, plus watching someone’s body language and facial expressions will help you avoid misinterpretations that could lead to bigger conflicts.

The danger of social media friends

Of every good story, there is a bad side, and social connections made online can be a bit dangerous. Making social media friends has its disadvantages.

When a person is talking with someone online, they get more comfortable, and with that loosens you can accidentally reveal information about some personal things that might put you in a dangerous position. In other words, online connections can make you feel vulnerable and possibly say and do things that you wouldn’t normally do.

In virtual friends, there is someone to hack us or stalk us to gain something out. The second dangerous thing is more physical.

If internet communication is getting very frequent we become socially isolated and mentally unavailable not only for making real-life friends but also can affect our daily lifestyle outside the screens. This is one of the many toxic effects of social media .

People with whom you have built meaningful friendships would never put you in dangerous situations.

Having these examples we can conclude that in some certain way having online friends is dangerous and we need to be careful but on the other hand, we have the power to decide with whom we will interact online.

The Pros and Cons of having an online friend

Friendship on your terms (the benefits of real friendship).

Face-to-face connections are still very important. Nothing beats having a real friend and knowing that someone is always there for you no matter what. The feeling that you can trust someone is irreplaceable and we all need that social support . There are numerous reasons why real friendships are still important, but we will only mention a few of them just as a reminder:

• Real-life friendships create much profound bonds between two or more people
• Friends function as a support system building intimacy and trust
• It’s better to have a few real friends than hundreds of social media friends who might not be there for you and could disappear
• Friends keep us active and are able to advise us
• A real friendship needs to maintain making us feel involved and part of something bigger
• Time with friends influences our confidence and increases happiness

Some people don’t know the value of a real friend. Maybe they don’t want to have one or just can’t make one. Either way you need to try even if sometimes the whole process seems difficult because, in the end, you will come to a realization that it was worth it.

Conclusion – Are online friends real friends?

Despite the negative side of having social media friends, we need to accept the fact that they have their place in some people’s lives in this modern era. But still, that kind of friendship doesn’t provide people with the social, emotional or physical learning and development they need.

Nowadays parents need to be encouraging their kids from a younger age to be developing and foster friendships in the real world for a better and healthier lifestyle. Many people would say that online friendships are transient and not as deep as real ones, other people would say the reverse, that sometimes you can be more open and honest when communicating with someone directly through social media.

We can make the conclusion that different people have different opinions and because of that there is no simple answer to the main question “Are social media friends as deep and meaningful as long-standing friendships in the real world?” Which, when you think about it, is just another form of communication and it’s your personal decision what is REAL for you.

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Are Online And Real Life Friendships The Same? How The Internet Makes A Difference

The internet has been a part of mainstream culture for well over two decades now, and yet there is still a stigma towards online friends. With today’s technology, you can video chat with your friends with ease, talk to them from wherever you are, and have a digital bond that lasts. However, if your friend lives somewhere that you can’t travel to, you may wonder if that friend is as legitimate as a friend who lives nearby. The answer is yes. In this article, we’ll explain why.

Pros of having an online friend

Nowhere in the definition of the word “friend” does it indicate you must communicate in person. Online friendships are a wonderful part of many people’s lives. You can bond with someone from behind another screen, and sometimes the bond goes deeper than it does for your in-person friends – for several reasons.

Mutual interests

Forums make it easier to meet friends who share a common interest. Be it a political group, a blog dedicated to a certain fandom, a specific hobby, or many other commonalities, having a mutual interest is a great icebreaker. While you don't have to have everything in common with a friend, having shared interests is one way to spark a conversation.

Easier to break the ice

Perhaps the best thing about online communication is how easy it is to strike up a conversation. If you're introverted, shy, or just don't like talking to strangers, it's often hard to make that first move. On the internet, however, it's easier for most to make that first comment or send that first message. You can take time to write out exactly what you want to say. 

You can get to know them faster

Most people online are more comfortable with talking about themselves. They'll talk about their flaws, their mental illnesses, what they fear, and so on. In real life, it's hard to talk about some things without feeling like you're going to be laughed at. Due to the ease of online communication, you can often learn more about someone much faster than you can in real life.

You can make friends around the globe

Making friends with someone from a different part of the world can be a fun experience. You can find out more about their culture, and they can learn from you. Best of all, if you do get a chance to visit where they live, you may have a place to stay and someone to show you around. They might even be able to chip in for a plane ticket. For the traveler, having friends across the globe can be a good thing.

There are multiple ways to communicate

Communication doesn't have to be text-based. You can have video chats through your computer or phone. You two can walk around the town, talking to each other. It isn't a perfect replication of actually being there together, but it can be unique and fun. 

Cons of having an online friend

With that said, online friends have their disadvantages as well.

Hanging out is hard

Even if your online friend lives just a few hours from you, you're probably not going to visit them that often. You two have separate lives and arranging a meeting can be difficult – and costly. 

Miscommunication

Some forms of digital communication – like texting – can be misconstrued because body language and tone of voice are absent. You can use emojis, but they're not always helpful. Taking offense to a benign message is common. It can also be harder to get the hint that someone doesn't want to talk to you. Be patient and remember that miscommunications will happen. 

Harder to make up

If you're going to be friends with someone for a long time, you're probably going to get into disagreements at some point. With in-person friendships, you may get mad at each other for a while but then makeup – especially if the two of you have mutual friends. Sometimes, making up is the best option to keep the friend circle going.

With an online friend, however, it's easy for them to get mad, hit the block button, and then find another online friend, forgetting about you in the process. When you're blocked, it becomes difficult to try to reach them. It's also socially unacceptable to make another account and try talking to them. 

When communicating with an online friend, keep your cool if there is an argument. Don't reach for the block button. Take some time alone and talk again with a cool head. If you do hit the block button, remember you can always unblock.

They disappear

If you grew up online, you may have had an online friend who just disappeared. Maybe their account got hacked or the website you use to talk through is no more. Some people take breaks from social media, or tear down their accounts and rebuild them somewhere else. All it takes is a changed username to make reconnecting with an online friend difficult. It’s smart to get more contact info than just the social media site they're on. 

They may not be what they seem

If you're on a message board, exercise caution when making an online  friendship , especially if you're younger. You shouldn't accept an invitation to hang out with someone until you know for sure they're who they say they are.

Stay true to yourself

When making friends online, you want to stay true to yourself and what you want out of a friendship. You can find friends who reflect your interests and passions. It’s important to connect with people who will respect you and reflect your morals and values. When you’re finding friends – whether online or in real life – it’s okay to be picky. These are people who are here to support you. For them to know you well, you need to be real. 

New friendships are an exciting opportunity to show off your personality. When you make friends online, there are ways to show these individuals who you are through words, phone, or video chat. You don’t have to pretend you like something just to fit in. The whole point of making friends online is to find people whom you relate to who can enrich your life. 

The point of seeking people to chat with on the internet is to feel less alone. When you find friends online, you can tell them about what matters to you. Find friends online who care about your hobbies and can relate to you. Join some social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram to widen your options for connecting with others. There are also groups you can join where people have similar interests to you. Think about what’s important to you, and look at ways to connect with others. There’s a platform to make friends for everyone!

Be safe online

It’s exciting to have online friends, but don’t get carried away, it’s important to be  safe . Be careful not to reveal information about yourself too soon. When meeting new friends online, find ones who are slow to open up and don’t just blurt out all their personal details. Be safe, and take your time revealing who you are. You don’t want to tell anyone where you live or work until you get to know them well. You don’t want people showing up at your door because you told them your address.

If you meet new friends, focus on your personality. See what your friends start revealing to you and build off these facts. In a way, it’s like “friend dating.” You’re testing out who you want to get close to, and which relationships to foster or let go. You’re going online to find people who you can talk to, and be emotionally vulnerable with, but that feeling comes with time. Like any friendship, trust takes time. You want to find new friends online who seem trustworthy. Let them earn that trust. 

What to look for in an online friendship

Friendships take time to develop. You want to look for somebody who genuinely is interested in you, and you are curious about them. Someone who is genuinely interested in being your friend will ask you questions about your interests and your life. 

When making friends with people you can't see in person, pay attention to the words they use; they matter. You want to read what they're telling you and take those statements at face value. The stories and reflections they impart about their real-life friendships will show you what sort of person they are. If they're loyal, it will come across. 

Another thing you can do is talk about yourself and see how they respond. Do they want to know more? Pay attention to the way a friend you're interested in talks to you. By being observant when you're meeting friends, you can learn a lot about them. 

Once you get to know each other and you're regularly conversing, how do you know if your online friend cares about you? You can gauge that by how often you speak to each other, what you talk about, and if they're there for you during rough times. When you find new friends online, it's crucial to have high standards for them. You deserve to be treated with respect and cared for in friendships. 

If you open up to your buddies on the internet during hard times and they're responsive, that's a good sign. That means they care for you. If you feel positive in the friendship, go with that instinct. If something is off, follow your gut there too. When you meet new friends online, they should align with what you want in life and care about you as a human being.

Getting help

While it is often easier to connect with people online compared to in person, it can still be unnerving. While many people online are nice, depending on the forum, there are also “keyboard cowboys” and cyberbullies whose main goal online is to argue and belittle other people. Other people have social anxiety disorder, which makes it extra difficult to strike up a conversation with someone new, sometimes even online.

A professional relationship counselor through Regain can help you navigate your friendships. They can also help with issues like social anxiety disorder or cyberbullying 

If you have a hard time connecting with others, one of the most important steps that you can take is to reach out to a counselor.  Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is a popular method of psychotherapy that has been found to help individuals with social anxiety, depression, and many other mental health concerns. CBT helps you learn new ways of behaving, thinking, and responding to social situations, as well as helping to build self-confidence . 

Studies have found that Internet-based CBT (iCBT) is usually just as effective as in-person therapy, which can make it easier for individuals who have social anxiety, as well as for those wanting to practice their online communication skills. Online counseling with Regain lets you find a professional relationship therapist without having to leave the comfort of your home, and they can work around your schedule, not vice versa.  

When you're talking to friends in a new setting, such as a social media platform or chatroom, you may not know what to expect. That's natural, but try to relax and be yourself. If you need help maneuvering through online friendships or working through mental health concerns like social anxiety, an online Regain counselor can help. Reach out today. 

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about online friends

Do online friends count as real friends? If you're reading this, it's likely that you talk to people online or have talked to someone online at least once. When you meet people on the internet, you might be seeking a sense of support or connection. Maybe, you're about to move to a new area, and you're looking for friends online who are in the location you're moving to. Perhaps, you play games online and have met friends through gaming. If you're wondering, "Are online friends real?" the answer is yes. Online friends absolutely count as real friends. It doesn't matter where you met; it's the social-emotional connection that counts. You may start out with digital communication and move on to hanging out in person, or you may take a while to meet due to distance. Either way, online friendships can be special and unique connections. How to make friends is different for everybody. For some, it comes naturally whereas for others, it's a conscious effort, and both are completely valid.

Why are real friends better than online friends? Again, it's not where you meet that makes friends real. Many people meet their online friends face-to-face and establish connections with them offline. Whether you met someone in high school, at a social event, or online, you can have long-term associations with them that amplify your mental health and quality of life overall. Nothing beats having a true friend that you know will be there for you and that you can trust. Of course, before you consider online friends real friends, you have to make sure that they are who they say they are and establish trust. Online friendships are becoming more and more common, and people meet people online in person every day. Online friendships were once kept on the down-low or shunned and were regarded as separate from in-person friendships, but times are changing, and most people have at least one friend that they met digitally before engaging with one another face to face. There is something special about talking to people face to face and hanging out in person. In fact, it's irreplaceable, and it's important for your mental health to have social support that exists offline. That said, it's necessary to remember that for some, online connections become face-to-face connections. Don't discount someone's friendship if they meet a person online because that person could mean a lot to them.

Is having online friends bad? Having online friends isn't bad as long as you go about it safely. If you're wondering what makes online friends real, it is partially the social-emotional connection you have and partially verifying that they are who they say they are. Before you make online friends real friends, make sure to video chat and talk on the phone. Be sure to always bring someone with you when you meet people that you've only had digital communication with so far in person.

Are online friends healthy? Having online friends is certainly healthy as long as the internet does not become your whole life. Online friendships can be unique in the sense that you are likely to bond over things that you have in common rather than your geographical location. Of course, having friends in real life is extremely important, but sometimes the people that you meet in person initially won't always have the same interests. For example, if you are interested in mental health, you might meet people through mental health groups online. If you're interested in travel, astrology, or another niche, you might also meet people online who are into those things. It is essential to have social support from people who truly understand you, and of course, you can always meet your online friends in real life eventually. Some are more extroverted than others, but even introverts need friends and experience health advantages from social connections.

Why is making friends online bad?

Making friends online is not bad, but it is essential to be safe about it. Often, when people criticize online friendships, the main part of the problem they see is the potential safety issues affiliated with meeting someone online. This is a valid concern, but there are measures to take. Be sure to talk to people you meet online through video chat before you meet up. Meet in a public place and bring someone with you. Online friendships aren't just made by adults, so it is important to be aware of the potential that your teenager might make friends online whether you know about it or not.

Many teens report having one or more online friendships or friends that they initially met online. If you are the parent of a teen who makes friends online, it is understandable and unavoidable that you will be concerned. Your concern is valid. When a teenager wants to find a way to meet an online friend in person, it's hard to stop them. One of the things you can do is support them and accompany them when they meet an online friend for the first time. That way, you can avoid the possibility that they might sneak out or do something equally as unsafe so that they can meet a person from the internet. You can join us at the mall or in a café. Public places are always your best bet, and you don't have to make things awkward. Just be there for the first meeting, and if possible, get to know the person's parents. Likely, the parents of your teenager's friend will want to attend their first in-person meeting as well, so you can talk to them before meeting up, and they can accompany you, your teen, and your teen's friend when they meet in person.

How long do online friendships last?

When you meet a friend online, it may be the start of a friendship that lasts for the rest of your life. As with any friendship, there is the potential to stray apart, but there is also the possibility of a lifelong connection. When you make online friends real-life friends by meeting in person, this can become especially true. Remember that there are real people behind the screen, and that's part of what makes online friends real. This is part of why it is so important to be kind to the people you meet online. You never know who is going through tough times, and the words you say to people both in real life and online matter. Cyberbullying is an extremely serious issue to be wary of when you talk to people online or if you know that your kids are talking to people online. Being on high alert when it comes to this kind of thing is crucial, but it doesn't make all online friendships unhealthy, nor does it make them invalid.

Think about online dating. Some people start dating individuals that they met over the internet and end up getting married. Couples that meet online can get married and stay together for the rest of their lives in some cases. Relationships can go bad whether they begin online or in person, but they can also be exceptional. The same is true for online friendships.

Can you trust online friends? It's important not to trust people online too quickly. You can trust online friends once you meet them in person and confirm that they are who they say they are. Again, it's essential to take someone with you and stay safe when you meet an online friend in person. Video chat can be a place to start when it comes to making virtual connections real. Using video chat, you can see people's facial expressions and hear their voice, making everything feel more authentic. It can take time to develop trust in any friendship, but that's especially true for online friendships due to the possibility that you may come across someone who isn't who they say they are in any capacity from time to time. Trust will build over the course of months or years when you have phone calls, move onto video chat, and meet up in person. Once you've met someone in person in a safe manner, your bond can become even stronger. Meeting online friends in person for the first time is a joyful moment for a ton of people, and as long as you take every safety precaution possible, making virtual connections can be the start of a long, healthy friendship.

Who are real friends? Notice how easy for you to say "I love my family. I love my friends ." Real friends are like your family that you can count on. They make you feel good. Social connections are positive for your mental health, and being around someone who is a real friend will generally be uplifting. A true friend should give you a sense of support. When we talk about a support system, we often think of friends, family, and possibly, a mental health professional or multiple mental health providers. A real friend is therefore you through tough times and pleasant times alike and enhances your life.

What do online friends do online friends talk via web chat, phone calls, video chat, and more. sometimes, online friends will play games together remotely. they may chat or meet on web forums. when you meet a friend online, the eventual goal is often to establish a connection in person. you may text each other throughout the day or talk on social media, and if you live near the same area, you might meet up..

What is the difference between a real friendship and an online friendship?

• Advice On How To End A Friendship
• The Best Quotes About Friendship To Live By

The value of online friendships and how they compare to 'real' friends

By Kellie Scott

• X (formerly Twitter)

There's a woman in Spain I've never met who has a lot of dirt on me — perhaps more than some of my "real" friends.

We met via Instagram two years ago after bonding over a hashtag and have been chatting ever since.

While I couldn't have predicted my inappropriate and mostly unfunny use of emojis would bring me close to a perfect stranger thousands of kilometres away, it's not an unusual relationship in 2019.

Most of us have online connections of some kind, and increasingly many that are exclusively virtual.

Are we placing too much value and trust in people we've never seen in the flesh? Or is a good mate online as valuable as those IRL?

Content — a new ABC vertical video series — explores this with its lead character Lucy Goosey, who experiences some of the tensions between online and offline friendships while chasing influencer fame.

I spoke to a couple of experts and someone in the same boat as me to get their take.

Why we love our online mates

Oversharing with my Instagram friend instead of friends IRL wasn't planned — it just kind of happened.

Lucy Good from the Sunshine Coast credits that to the availability of online mates.

The 44-year-old runs a Facebook page designed to support single mums, with 16,000 followers. To help run the page she recruited 14 women to help with the page admin.

Despite having never met them, Lucy's grown quite close to the group she calls her "admin sisters".

"We all want to support single mums which makes us quite similar," she says.

"And whereas we don't allow venting or man bashing in the group, when it comes to our little group, we're the first people we go to with our problems."

She says her internet friends are nearly always reachable.

"You have them there at your fingertips all the time," she says. "But it's also OK to leave the conversation and pick it up again when you're ready."

She describes the friendships as "very special" and lower maintenance than friends you need to physically see — it's all part of the appeal.

"You can just send a message out, if they are there, great. If not, it's fine. It's easier to maintain," she says.

"The only thing we miss is the contact, the intimacy of touch and cuddles, but we can make up for that by sending love heart emojis!"

Psychologist Leanne Hall says an element of anonymity online can make it easier to share parts of yourself you might otherwise find difficult.

"It means people can often open up a bit more," she says.

And there are many more connection options to find when using the internet.

Lucy says making friends online has taught her how to "connect differently and with different people".

"You are connecting to people you would perhaps not usually meet in real life … and that can be quite life-changing."

What's missing with online friendships?

Love heart emojis might make up for a lack of affection in Lucy's book, but what about all that other stuff physical connection brings?

Ms Hall says "in real life" you know a friend on a more emotional and connected level.

"You have the benefit of seeing body language and facial expression. A lot of how we communicate is non-verbal," she says.

Julie Fitness, professor of psychology at Macquarie University, agrees those lacking cues can make the friendship less rich. She adds you're relying on the person to "curate" an accurate representation of themselves.

"There are a lot of cues you can't share [online] like tone of voice, observing you interacting with your parents and other friends," Professor Fitness says.

"If it's exclusively online … you are curating the information you are communicating.

"You have an opportunity to put out your best self or only communicate things you are comfortable with."

How to make your online relationships meaningful

Be vulnerable, but careful

To help avoid only showing your best self, which can lead to a "shallow" connection, Ms Hall recommends being as open and honest as possible.

Don't just show the "highlight reel", she says.

"If you want a deeper connection online, it has to be a vulnerable connection, you need to be honest and embrace the fact that life is not perfect, and encourage the other person to do the same thing," Ms Hall says.

But make sure you trust who you're engaging before you get deep and meaningful.

"It might make sense to be more revealing and vulnerable [to build those online friendships], but you have to be so careful about who you're doing that with," Professor Fitness says.

"You can experiment with making yourself a bit vulnerable, and if there is disclosure in return and warmth and empathy, then the friendship may develop.

"Trust is a huge factor in online relationships because people can be deceived online ."

Choose people you share a common interest with

Finding friends online through an interest group will help set you up for success, explains Professor Fitness.

"You're more likely to meet someone as it's about sharing values and fun.

"This is why those online support groups can be really supportive [for example] because you know that people are understanding of your situation and they're warm and sympathetic to you."

And make sure they're as into the friendship as you are — there needs to be mutual interest and effort.

"A friendship you put as a seven out of 10 on your scale of closeness might be a nine out of 10 in the eyes of the person you are communicating with," Professor Fitness says.

Assess your needs and capacity to invest

Lucy says a real trap is biting off more than you can chew and consequently feeling drained or letting people down.

"There are many people who are isolated and wanting to connect, and if they see you are happy to be their friend they will jump at the chance," she says.

"Don't give them hope if you can't give them the time they deserve."

Professor Fitness says being on the same page about expectations and setting boundaries can help with this.

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Face-to-face connections still important

Ms Hall believes you can live without online friends, but you shouldn't live without those you can spend physical time with.

"The benefit of online comes in when they are in addition to real-life friendships, not instead of," Ms Hall says.

But research shows for people who are isolated , such as those living in regional areas or some older Australians, online connections can be a lifeline.

"The internet is really useful for keeping in touch with family and grandchildren," Professor Fitness says.

To be "really functional" though, you need both.

"You need the face-to-face friends, as well as the wider social networks," Professor Fitness says.

"When looking for a partner, for example, that's a really optimal time to have a rich and broad social network."

Lucy says it's important to support your online friends in the same way would any friend.

"Laugh and cry with them — you can still do that online. In that respect it's the same as a normal friendship."

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Comparing the Happiness Effects of Real and On-Line Friends

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Affiliation Department of Economics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

• John F. Helliwell, 
• Haifang Huang

• Published: September 3, 2013
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754
• Reader Comments

A recent large Canadian survey permits us to compare face-to-face (‘real-life’) and on-line social networks as sources of subjective well-being. The sample of 5,000 is drawn randomly from an on-line pool of respondents, a group well placed to have and value on-line friendships. We find three key results. First, the number of real-life friends is positively correlated with subjective well-being (SWB) even after controlling for income, demographic variables and personality differences. Doubling the number of friends in real life has an equivalent effect on well-being as a 50% increase in income. Second, the size of online networks is largely uncorrelated with subjective well-being. Third, we find that real-life friends are much more important for people who are single, divorced, separated or widowed than they are for people who are married or living with a partner. Findings from large international surveys (the European Social Surveys 2002–2008) are used to confirm the importance of real-life social networks to SWB; they also indicate a significantly smaller value of social networks to married or partnered couples.

Citation: Helliwell JF, Huang H (2013) Comparing the Happiness Effects of Real and On-Line Friends. PLoS ONE 8(9): e72754. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754

Editor: Cédric Sueur, Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien, France

Received: January 31, 2013; Accepted: July 12, 2013; Published: September 3, 2013

Copyright: © 2013 Helliwell, Huang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This research is supported by the Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The corresponding author is co-director of that program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: One of the data sources for this study is a survey sponsored by Coca-Cola. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. This does not alter the authors’ adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Introduction

There are constant changes in the types of activities that people engage in, and in the technologies they use to establish and enjoy their social connections. For example, Robert Putnam’s analysis of movements in social capital in the United States over the 20th century showed that memberships in most US organizations, the frequency of dinner parties, league bowling, and many other types of social connection grew for the first 70 years of the 20th century and declined thereafter [1] . Some commentators and researchers argued that there were new types of social connection, possibly more effective in nature, that were growing and possibly offsetting the effects of declines elsewhere. One of the key examples offered was the substitution of on-line for face-to-face (we use this term interchangeably with ‘real-life’) friendships. The internet could thereby be seen as providing ways of enhancing or replacing face-to-face friends through the availability of on-line social networks.

How can the effects of these differing trends be compared? To judge the importance and value of differing forms of friendship requires a common basis for valuation. The broadening availability of data for subjective well-being offers one possible solution to this valuation problem. If it were possible to measure each individual’s network of on-line and real-life friends, then their respective contributions to subjective well-being could provide a way of comparing their values, and hence to judge whether the quality of social networks as a whole was growing or shrinking. Only very recently has there been a survey that provided comparable measures of networks of face-to-face and on-line friends, set in the context of a well-being survey of sufficient size and scope to permit comparable assessments of the two types of friends.

Literature Review

Friends and family are a long-established support for subjective well-being. Friends matter to happiness both for being potential sources of social support and for the pleasures from time spent together, whether at work, at play, or in activities for the benefit of others. Data from the Gallup World Poll suggest that having someone to call on in times of trouble is associated with a life evaluation that is higher, on a 0 to 10 scale, by almost half a point (page 298 in [2] ). This is more than the equivalent of increasing household incomes by 150%. There is also a dose-response relationship, so that having more friends is better than having fewer. Evidence from the Canadian General Social Survey shows that, compared to respondents having no close friends, to have 3 to 5 close friends is associated with life satisfaction 0.24 points higher on a 10-point scale, an amount that rises to.32 for those with 6 to 10 close friends, and to 0.43 points for those with more than 20 close friends [3] . Also notable is that happiness depends not just on the number of close friends, but also the frequency with which they are seen [3] , [4] . The same survey also asks about the number of close relatives, and the frequency with which they are seen. An interesting difference appears between friends and family. The number of close family matters more than the number of close friends, about twice as much up to 15 in number, with no gain thereafter, while frequency of seeing family contributes only half as much as the frequency of seeing close friends [3] . A similar result is found in US and other Canadian data analyzed by [5] , where it is shown that the frequency of seeing friends adds twice as much to subjective well-being as does the frequency of seeing family. The US and Canadian surveys in [5] also reveal a strong relation between subjective well-being and the frequency of seeing friends, with those seeing friends most frequently having subjective well-being higher by 0.5 points on a ten-point scale.

All of these results are based on fully specified models with many other control variables, although there is no doubt likely to be some remaining element of mutual causality between subjective well-being and the frequency of seeing friends. For example, those who are at the bottom end of the subjective well-being scale, and especially those who are clinically depressed, often reduce the extent to which they reach out to friends. Indeed social withdrawal is a key element in the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) [6] , as supported in subsequent factor-analytic work by [7] . Thus some of the strong positive linkages between friends and happiness may reflect causal influences running in both directions. This is likely to apply for both real-life and on-line friends, and hence should not affect our comparisons in this paper between these two types of friends.

There are few studies of the linkages between on-line friendships and subjective well-being. One study [8] found a positive relation between subjective well-being and number of Facebook friends among a sample of 391 college-age subjects. Another study of college-age respondents in the United States, while not directly investigating the links between Facebook usage and subjective well-being, did find evidence that Facebook usage was correlated with proxy measures of social capital, but only for those with relatively low levels of satisfaction with campus life [9] . An earlier study of social capital and internet usage in a sample of US adolescents [10] found no significant relation between subjective well-being and time spent on-line. Those who spent more time messaging with close real-life friends were happier. Conversely, the relation between on-line time and subjective well-being was negative for those in contact with strangers or purely on-line friends. A recent study of Egyptian students found no significant relation between life satisfaction and intensity of Facebook usage [11] .

Although there are many studies showing the effects of marital status on subjective well-being, we have not found previous attempts to see if the happiness effects of either real-life or on-line friends differ by marital status. Using two different surveys, we look for, and find, a large interaction effect in the happiness effects of marital status and real-life friends, but no significant differences for the effects of on-line friends.

We think that our results are the first to compare the happiness effects of real-life and on-line friends. Hence there are no directly comparable prior studies. Based on a meta-analysis [12] of fifty years of studies showing significantly more effective cooperation in conflict resolutions using face-to-face rather than written communications, we might conjecture that a similar difference might exist to differentiate the happiness effects of real-life and on-line friends.

Data and Summary Statistics

The primary dataset for the paper is the 2011 Happiness Monitor survey sponsored by Coca-Cola and conducted in Canada between January 20 and 31, 2011 by Leger Marketing, using their online panel LegerWeb. The sample includes 5,025 Canadian residents, aged 16 and over, drawn from all ten Canadian provinces. The survey focuses on subjective well-being, and has questions that cover self-evaluation of life and other questions that can be used to construct alternative measures of well-being. It also has questions on people’s opinions about how various elements in life contribute to happiness. A section called Canadiana has occasionally light-hearted questions such as what is the happiest job in Canada, with a list that includes Zamboni driver and lumberjack.

From our perspective, the most interesting questions (other than the ones on well-being) are those on the size of social networks, separately for real-life friends and on-line friends. This presents an opportunity for us to examine potential differences between these two types of networks, specifically in their contributions to subjective well-being.

We use regression analysis to relate measures of subjective well-being to the sizes of social networks, as well as income and demographic controls. We will also use control variables to pick up differences in personalities; such variables include self-reported stress, time spent exercising and contributions to charitable causes.

The survey’s primary measure of subjective well-being is an 11-point (from 0 to 10) life ladder , based on the question “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” This question, also known as Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Ladder, is frequently used in well-being studies, including the recent World Happiness Report [13] and many studies cited therein. We plot the distribution of sample responses in the first panel of Figure 1 . The mode is “7” with a quarter of the respondents. The next greatest concentration is “8” with about 20% of the responses. The sample mean is 6.8, significantly lower than for the Canadian ladder responses in the Gallup World Poll, as shown in figure 2 .3 of the World Happiness Report.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.g001

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.g002

It is possible to construct two other measures of well-being from the survey. One is life satisfaction, based on the four-point responses to the question “To what extent do you agree with each of the following statements” that include a statement “I am satisfied with my life”. The four points are “strongly agree”, “somewhat agree”, “somewhat disagree” and “strongly disagree”. The second panel of Figure 1 shows the distribution. The mode, covering more than 50% of the responses, is “somewhat agree”. Another potential measure is the response to the question “How happy are you at the beginning of 2011? Very happy, somewhat happy, somewhat unhappy, very unhappy.” The distribution of happiness is similar to that of life satisfaction: the third step “somewhat happy” has more than 50% of the sample. We will use these two measures of well-being for robustness tests.

There is also a question on the level of stress, specifically the response to the question “How would you rate your average daily stress levels? Very low, Low, Medium, High, Very high.” Its distribution is shown in the last panel of Figure 1 . The response of “Medium” has the greatest share of responses at 40%.

We now move on to the two questions on social networks. The first question concerns real-life friends. The exact wording is “How big is your real-life social network of friends?” The permitted responses, unless the respondents refuse to answer, include “Less than 10 friends”, “Between 10 and 20 friends”, “Between 20 and 30 friends”, “Between 30 and 50 friends”, and “More than 50 friends”. The distribution of the network size is shown in the upper panel of Figure 2 . A large majority of the sample, almost 80%, is in the first two categories (i.e., with fewer than 20 friends).

The immediately next question in the survey concerns online friends: “How big is your online social network?” The responses include “I don't have an online social network”, “Less than 100”, “Between 100–300”, “Between 300–500”, “Between 500–700” and -Greater than 700”. The distribution is shown on the lower panel of Figure 2 . A large majority of the sample either has no online friends (about 25%) or have fewer than 100 of them (about 50%).

The two network questions have different numbers of steps, and both have some steps with sparse responses (see Figure 2 ). We correct for these problems by combining the top two categories of real-life network into one single category with 11% of the sample, and the top three categories of online network into one category with 9% of the sample. This way, we turn the two network sizes into a comparable scale of four steps. In the case of real-life network, the four categories are “less than 10”, “10–20”, “20–30” and “30 or more”, with 44%, 34% 11% and 11% of the sample, respectively. The size of online network falls into “0”, “1–100”, “100–300”, “300 or more”, with 23%, 50.8%, 17.6% and 8.6% of the sample, respectively.

Table 1 presents summary statistics of other variables. The average age is 45. Forty-five percent (45%) of the sample are married; 15% in common-law relation, 5% dating, 23% single; the remaining 12% are divorced, separated, widowed or are unknown. The income information is based on categorical responses of income intervals. We estimate the midpoint of each interval under the assumption that income follows a log-normal distribution. We then assign respondents in each interval the corresponding midpoint estimate. The categories for the income variables are “$20,000 and below”, “$20,001 to $35,000”, “$35,001 to $50,000”, “$50,001 to $75,000”, “$75,001 and $110,000” and “more than $110,000”. The estimated midpoints are $13,605, $27,073, $41,895, $60,345, $87,895 and $136,849 respectively. About 15% of the sample did not provide income information. We use a dummy variable to indicate such a status in the regression analysis. Among those that have valid income information, the sample mean is $51 thousand. The average time spent on moderate to high intensity exercising is 1.78 hours per week. Close to 60% of survey respondents indicated that they currently volunteer or give time or money to charitable causes.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.t001

A second dataset that we use is the European Social Survey (ESS), a biennial cross-sectional survey of residents aged 15 and over within private households that is “designed to chart and explain the interaction between Europe's changing institutions and the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of its diverse populations” (The European Social Survey project). We use the cumulative file for rounds 1–4 (2002, 2004, 2006, 2008) that has 34 participating countries. The ESS does not have information relating to online social networks. Instead, it has information on survey respondents’ frequency of socially meeting with friends, relatives or colleagues. Figure 3 plots the distribution of the frequency, in the categories of “Never”, “Less than once a month”, “Once a month”, “Several times a month”, “Once a week”, “Several times a week” and “Every day”.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.g003

The ESS has two alternative measures of SWB, happiness and life satisfaction. The two underlying questions are “Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are?” and “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays?”. Both SWB measures are on a 11-point ascending scale from 0 to 10, with 0 indicating extremely unhappy/dissatisfied and 10 indicating extremely happy/satisfied. Figure 4 plots the distributions. Table 2 presents summary statistics of other variables.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.g004

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.t002

By covering many different countries, adopting a different way of measuring interactions with friends, and by having additional measures of subjective well-being, the ESS increases the power and generality of our findings about the happiness effects of real-life friends.

Regression Analysis

The measure of life ladder is ordinal; but as commonly found in the literature, little is lost if we treat it as cardinal. For example, [14] reported that the choice between probit regressions, which treats dependent variables as ordinal, and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), which treats dependent variables as cardinal, makes virtually no difference to the estimated relationships between happiness and important explanatory variables. In this paper, we will present results from the method of OLS; Ordered Probit estimations yield qualitatively similar findings. In terms of quantitative evaluations, our discussions will be based largely on the concept of compensating differentials: we will compare the estimated effects of social networks to the estimated effects of income. The ratios of coefficients are almost invariant to the choice of regression methods, as switching between OLS and Ordered Probit affects estimated coefficients almost proportionally (see [15] for an example).

The variables of interest on the right-hand side are the sizes of social networks in real life and on-line. In both cases, the size information is based on categorical choices from a set of intervals (the distributions are shown in Figure 2 ). We enter the size information into the regressions in two different ways. The first approach uses a set of dummy variables to indicate the intervals. This avoids making assumptions regarding the functional form of the relationships between network sizes and subjective well-being. The second approach imposes an assumption that the relationship is log-linear. To implement the log-linear approach, we turn the intervals into continuous values by assigning the midpoint of an interval to observations in that interval. In the case of real-life friends, the category “Less than 10 friends” is assigned a value of 5, the category “Between 10 and 20 friends” receives a value of 15, and so on. The top category “More than 50 friends” is assigned a value of 60. Similarly, we assign continuous values to the size of online network by assigning zero to the category “I don’t have an online social network”, the value of 50 to “Less than 100”, the value of 200 to “Between 100–300”, and so on. The top category “Greater than 700” receives a value of 800.

Table 3 shows the regression output. In all columns, the dependent variable is the 0–10 point life ladder. In the first column, we enter the network sizes as a set of categorical variables. In the second column, the network sizes are in (logged) continuous values. The first two columns show the happiness effects of real-life and on-line friends without the inclusion of other variables. In columns (3) and (4) we add a full set of control variables to be described below, and in columns (5) and (6) we further test the robustness of our findings by adding a measure of psychological stress.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.t003

Columns (1) and (2) provide the simplest and starkest evidence that real-life and on-line friends have very different associations with subjective well-being. Whether measured as categories or as continuous variables, real-life friends are positively associated with happiness, while on-line networks have a negative relationship. The strong positive effects of real-life networks are consistent with much other research. The strong negative effects of on-line friends are more surprising. The difference between the two effects is striking. Because the size and nature of friendships is likely to be correlated with age, gender, marital status, income and other variables, we shall do our main analysis of results using columns (3) and (4), which confirm our first results showing sharply differing effects of real-life and on-line friends, but largely eliminate the estimated negative effects of on-line networks.

The estimated effects of the newly added control variables are largely consistent with the literature. As commonly found, there is a positive and statistically significant income effect. The estimates of the effect are largely invariant across specifications, and suggest that doubling income ( i.e. , an increase of logged income by 0.7 unit) increases the life ladder by about 0.3. Later we will use this estimate as a benchmark to evaluate the quantitative importance of social networks. In term of genders, male respondents tend to report a lower evaluation of life. There is a U-shape relationship between age and life ladder: the life ladder falls as age rises but makes a U-turn in the 40 s. In terms of marital status, the happiest respondents are those who are in a relationship (married, common-law, or dating). The least happy group, which we use as the reference group, includes those who are divorced, widowed or separated. The group of non-dating singles lies in between. The difference between singles and the in-relationship groups is substantial, equivalent to the impact of increasing logged income by an entire unit. There is a strong negative effect associated with being unemployed, a positive effect associated with exercising and volunteering time or money for charitable causes. The estimated coefficients on the educational variables turn out largely insignificant, likely because the control variables already include measure of household income and social-context variables that are correlated with education.

The sizes of social networks enter columns (3) and (5) in Table 3 as categorical variables of intervals. The reference groups that are left out are those that have the smallest networks, specifically “less than 10” in the case of real-life friends and zero in the case of online friends. The estimated effects of real-life friends are all statistically significant and quantitatively substantial. Compared to the group that has fewer than 10 friends, the estimates in column (3) suggests that having 10–20 friends increases the life ladder by 0.29 points, equivalent to the improvement associated with a 0.7 unit of logged income (or 100% increase of income). Compared to the same reference group, having 20–30 friends increases the ladder by 0.32 points, while having more than 30 friends increases the evaluation by 0.36. The estimates thus suggest a substantial non-linearity in the relationship between network sizes and well-being. The most substantial increase in well-being occurs when moving from the group of “less than 10” to the group of “10 to 20”. The marginal contribution beyond that is quite small. Columns (4) and (6), which treat network sizes as continuous values, also show positive and significant coefficients. The variable of network size is expressed in logarithms. The coefficient estimate is 0.19, equivalent to the well-being gain from a 0.44 rise increase in logged income. Doubling the number of real-life friends is equivalent to increasing income by more than one half.

The findings for on-line networks are strikingly different from those for real-life friends. Compared to the reference group that has no on-line network at all, having a greater number of on-line friends is not associated with a higher level of life ladder. If anything, the correlation is negative, generally not significant at the 95% confidence level. Column (4) uses logged continuous values to express the size of networks. In such a specification, the estimated effect from the online network is negative and significant, although it is quantitatively small (doubling the number of online friends has the equivalent effect of reducing income by 10%).

The regressions described above estimate the effect of the online social network while controlling for the size of real-life network. Given the positive correlations between online networks and real-life networks (the correlation coefficient is 0.25), we expect the coefficients for online networks size to become more positive if we remove the variables for real-life networks from the regressions. We performed this test using the equation of column (3), and it did indeed make the coefficients on online network size less negative, but they still maintain a negative sign throughout (though none of them has statistical significance at the 95% level).

The final two columns of the table add to the right-hand side of the regressions an extra variable: the self-reported level of daily stress. The inclusion of the stress variable increases the r-squared substantially (from 17% to 24%), but has little impact on the estimated effects of network sizes; nor does it change the contrast between the two types of network. These findings reinforce our earlier point that omitted variables, including those correlated with personality, will not put our conclusions at risk as long as their inclusion does not alter the key coefficients, and especially the relative impact of on-line and real-life friends. The equations adding stress thus provide additional evidence of the robustness of our results.

The next table, or Table 4 , uses the four-step life satisfaction and happiness answers as alternative dependent variables. For better comparability with the 0–10 point life ladder, we rescale the two variables so that they, too, have zero for the lowest level of satisfaction/happiness and 10 for the highest level. The estimates are similar to those from the estimations based on the life ladder. Real-life networks are important to satisfaction and happiness, while online networks are largely irrelevant. The biggest difference is that the estimated effect of real-life friendship is even greater for happiness and life satisfaction than for the life ladder. In the case of life ladder in Table 3 , doubling the number of real-life friends has the same effect as increasing income by more than one-half (exp.44 = 1.55). For life satisfaction, doubling the number of friends is equivalent to a doubling of income (exp.69 = 1.99), while for happiness it has the same effect as a trebling of income (exp 1.12 = 3.06).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.t004

Next, we split the sample into two subgroups: one includes respondents who are married or in a common-law relationship; the other includes the rest of the sample. This is to compare the importance of friendship and social networks in the two segments of the population. Our earlier results have already shown that both marriage and real-life friends contribute importantly to subjective well-being, and by somewhat comparable amounts. Our results also show that those who are single but dating are almost as happy as those who are living together, once again suggesting the importance of the social aspects of co-habitation.

Table 5 presents the split-sample estimates. Its first two columns use the life ladder as the dependent variable, while the other four apply to life satisfaction and happiness, respectively. For each of the alternative dependent variables, one column shows estimates from the married/partnered sample; the other shows estimates from the rest of the sample. The findings regarding social networks are similar across the measures of SWB. The sizes of on-line networks are largely statistically insignificant for both subgroups. The real-life networks, in contrast, have positive and generally significant effects on SWB; but there is a stark contrast between the married/partnered respondents and the rest of the sample. Real-life networks have greater effects for people who are not married/partnered. The estimated differences are substantial. In the case of life ladder, the estimated contribution of having more than more than 30 friends is 0.72 in the un-married/partnered sample; the standard error is 0.18. In contrast, the estimated contribution is only 0.14 for people who are married or in a common-law partnership; the standard error is 0.14. There is thus no overlap in the 95% confidence intervals of the two estimates. Regressions using the alternative measures of SWB show a similar pattern of difference, with real-life networks being significantly more valuable for people who are not married or in a common-law partnership. Finally, we note that when we separate the married group and the common-law group instead of treating them as a single sample, we find by and large similar relationships between real-life friends and happiness. Table 6 reports the estimates. In all cases, the point estimates of the real-life friends’ effects in the married sample or in the common-law sample are smaller than those in the rest of the population (in Table 5 ). This explains why we combine the married and the common-law population together as a single group, and compare it to the rest of the population.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.t005

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.t006

We also split the sample by gender (male and female) and by age group (16–34, 35–49, 50–64 and 65 and up). Table 7 presents the estimates. The estimated effects of on-line networks are mostly insignificant, or have signs indicating negative contributions to SWB. Real-life friends, on the other hand, have positive and mostly significant estimates. The biggest exception concerns the age group 35 to 49, for which none of the network variables (online or real) have any positive and significant effects. In fact, the highest size of on-line network is negatively associated with life ladder, with strong statistical significance.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.t007

Finally, we split the sample along the interactive gender×age groups: young (16–34) males and females, middle-aged (34–50) males and females, elder (50 and up) males and females. Table 8 presents the estimates. Many of the estimated effects of the real-life network become insignificant, likely due to the drop in sample size. But they retain their positive sign with very few exceptions. It is worth noting that, among middle-aged females, having the largest size of online network (300 online friends or more) has a large, negative and significant association with SWB. The estimated effect is so large that it exceeds that of being unemployed by a substantial margin. One possible explanation for this association is reverse causality, with unhappy people extending greater efforts to expand their on-line networks or resorting to more intensive online activity that leads to greater network sizes.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.t008

Findings from the ESS

The previous section makes three empirical observations: 1) the size of real-life social networks contributes positively to SWB; 2) the size of on-line social networks does not contribute to SWB; 3) the real-life social network is more valuable for respondents who are not married or in a common-law relationship. We can test the robustness of the first and the third observations using the European Social Survey (ESS), a large international survey whose first four rounds (2002–2008) include more than 180,000 individual respondents in 34 countries. The ESS does not, unfortunately, have information about on-line social networks.

We will use the ESS data to estimate equations similar to equ(1), but without the variable for on-line networks. There are two alternative measures of SWB from the survey, happiness and life satisfaction, both on the same 11-point scale from 0 to 10 as is used for the Cantril ladder in the Canadian survey. The variable of interest on the right-hand side is the response to the question “how often do you meet socially with friends, relatives or work colleagues?” This measure of social interactions is originally recorded in seven categories: “Never”, “Less than once a month”, “Once a month”, “Several times a month”, “Once a week”, “Several times a week” and “Every day”. To construct categorical indicators with sufficient sample sizes, we collapse the survey responses into five categories: “less than once a month including never” (with a combined mass of 11%), “once a month” (9%), “several times a month including once a week” (36%), “several times a week” (27%) and “every day” (17%). We then include the categorical indicators on the right-hand side of our estimations to explain SWB.

Our regressions also include a conventional set of control variables in SWB analysis: age, age squared, educational attainment, marital status, labour force status and income. We also control for country fixed effects and wave fixed effects (The wave 1 ESS was conducted in 2002, wave 2 in 2004, wave 3 in 2006 and wave 4 in 2008). The country fixed effects remove cross-country differences in per capita income as well as the potentially different interpretations regarding the scale of satisfaction and happiness. We also use the general level of trust (the response to the question whether “most people can be trusted, or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people”), the frequency of attending religious services outside special occasions, and self-reported health status to control for the differences in social and religious attitudes, subjective health, as well as possible personality differences. We use Ordinary Least Squares, clustering errors at the country level.

Tables 9 and 10 present the results. The findings for the control variables are similar to those reported in the previous section. Males tend to report lower happiness and satisfaction. There is a U-shape relation between age and SWB; those in the 40 s report the lowest happiness and life satisfaction. Compared to the divorced, separated or the widowed, being married or in a civil partnership is associated with higher SWB. The same is true for being never married, but to a lesser extent. Higher income is associated with higher SWB. We find positive income-SWB relation throughout the income distribution. The relation flattens out at middle and higher income, but the marginal contribution of income to well-being never falls to zero or becomes negative. In terms of labour force status, there is no significant difference between being employed and not participating. Being unemployed, however, is a significant negative factor with a large estimated effect. The SWB difference between unemployment and non-participation is similar to the difference arising from moving an individual from the lowest income decile to the 7th decile in the case of happiness, or to the 8th decile in the case of life satisfaction. General trust, the frequency of attending religious services and self-reported health status are all positive contributing factors to happiness and to life satisfaction.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.t009

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072754.t010

Our variable of special interest on the right-hand side is the frequency of socially meeting with friends, relatives and colleagues. The estimated coefficients on this variable are all positive. A higher frequency is associated with greater happiness and satisfaction. For happiness, the greatest improvement occurs when moving away from the bottom (less than once a month) to the category of “once a month”; the happiness increment is 0.4 point. There is a further gain of 0.25 when moving to “several times a month”, then a further 0.16 gain to “several time a week”, then a further 0.17 gain to “every day”. For life satisfaction, the marginal improvements associated with the same step-by-step moves are 0.31, 0.26, 0.17 and 0.09, respectively in the same order. These contributions, especially those arising from a move from the bottom (less than once a month) to the next level (once a month), are very substantial, more than the SWB gain due to a jump from the 5th income decile to the top decile in the case of happiness, and equivalent to a jump from the 5th decile to the 8th decile in the case of life satisfaction. But it is important to realize that there is only about 10% of the population whose frequency of social interactions is at the bottom with less than once a month; so we are talking about moving away from a small minority that has a very low frequency of social interactions. If we focus on the move from “several times a month” to “several times a week”, the marginal contribution is more moderate. The income equivalent is a move from the 5th decile to the 8th in the case of happiness, and from the 5th to the 7th in the case of life satisfaction.

We now examine the difference between married couples/civil partners and those who are not in such relations. The findings from the Canadian survey indicate that the importance of real-life networks to SWB is greater for those who are not in a marriage or a common-law partnership. The ESS yields qualitatively similar observations. The second and the third columns of Tables 9 present estimates from the spilt-sample estimation, with happiness as the dependent variable. Table 10 has the same split-sample estimations with life satisfaction as the dependent variable. For both SWB measures, the estimated effects of social interactions are lower for married/partnered couples than for the rest of the population. In most cases, the differences between point estimates are greater than two standard errors of individual estimates.

The findings from the ESS thus confirm that real-life social networks (captured as the frequency of social interactions in the ESS) are positive and substantial contributing factors to SWB, with an importance that is greater for people who are not married or in a civil partnership.

We have used data from a large new Canadian survey to estimate the subjective well-being benefits of comparably measured networks of real-life and on-line friends. We have three main results. First, we confirm many earlier studies showing the importance of real-life friends to subjective well-being. Second, we find that comparably measured networks of on-line friends have zero or negative correlations with subjective well-being, whether or not allowance is made for the influence of other factors. Third, we find significant interactions between marriage and friends as sources of happiness. The estimated well-being impact of the number of friends is much smaller for those who are married or living together, suggesting that friends and spouses provide some similar happiness benefits. We also find that single people who are dating have subjective well-being significantly higher than those who are not. The effect is almost as high as for living together, which in turn is nearly as high as being married. These results also suggest that the company and friendship of marriage matter as much as the legal institution. Our Canadian results on the well-being value of networks of real-life friends are confirmed also for large samples of data from the European Social Survey. We also confirm from the ESS the greater value of friends for those who are not married.

Our results on the relative values of real-life and on-line friends are likely to be specific to generations, countries, and demographic groups, and to change as social and technological changes alter the possibilities for these two types of social connection to be either mutually supportive or inconsistent in their consequences for well-being. The overall importance of friendship to the maintenance of subjective well-being would seem to support more widespread collection of comparable data on the size and quality of friendships of different types, whether real-life or on-line, or on or off the job.

The limitations of our current results relate in part to the fact that we have only one survey comparably measuring the size of networks of real-life and on-line friends, so that our results might depend to some extent on sample or population specifics. As in all correlation analysis, there are risks that the influences we treat as running from friends to happiness may also be running in the reverse direction, or be determined by some third factors not controlled for. Our hope is that these difficulties are sufficiently shared by the data for the two types of friends that our comparative results might be expected to hold in more experimental contexts. We hope at least to have provided a useful first look.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research for research support, and to Leger Marketing and Coca-Cola Canada for data from their 2011 Happiness Monitor. The Cumulative Data Rounds 1–4 of the European Social Surveys was available at www.europeansocialsurvey.org/ . The Happiness Monitor survey data needed for replicating the results reported in this paper will be made available to other researchers by the authors upon request.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: JFH HH. Analyzed the data: JFH HH. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: JFH HH. Wrote the paper: JFH HH.

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Are real-life|friends better than|online ones?

Social media helps us connect with more people than we meet in everyday life. But if you never meet someone face-to-face are they a proper friend? Plus, people can more easily lie about who they are online...

How much do you know about friendships?

How many real-life friends and acquaintances do people have on average?

On average, how many of the people that you call friends would also call you a friend?

On average, how many ‘core’ friends do people have?

Are you likely to lose some close friends if you get into a romantic relationship?

• You’ll probably lose one or two of your closest friends
• You’ll lose most of them
• Real friendships don’t change, whether you’re in a relationship or not

In the UK, we often greet our friends with a hug or a kiss. What do the Maasai tribe in Kenya do?

• Stick their tongues out
• Spit at one another

Aristotle said that there were three kinds of healthy friendship. Which of these isn’t one?

• A useful friendship: people who help each other do stuff, like study buddies
• A pleasant friendship: people who share hobbies and friends 
• A dependent friendship: people who can’t be happy unless the other one is
• A virtuous friendship: people who encourage each other to achieve greatness in life

The Japanese term ‘kenzoku’ is used to describe the deepest form of friendship. Which of these is NOT an example of ‘kenzoku’?

• Never asking you to place the friendship before your principles
• Saying things that make you happy, no matter what
• A commitment to your happiness
• Inspiring you to live up to your best potential

Good friends are often genetically similar.

Virtual friendships rock… and always have?

Some people feel that social media is damaging real friendships and think that teens prefer to like a friend’s Instagram pictures or send a tweet rather than hanging out in real life. But are they right? Hasn’t it always been possible to sustain friendships without being face-to-face?

Thanks to the invention of the smart phone, these days we can pretty much talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere. (Unless you’re on a train, in which case good luck getting any signal - grrr.) But this isn’t such a new phenomenon. Although we can definitely communicate more instantly now than we used to - a text or a Tweet reaches us much quicker than a carrier pigeon - we’ve been chatting to long distance friends since the Roman Empire and before. We just used different tools...

Sneaky smoke signals

Before the written word, letters were off the table. Obviously. So in order to get news to someone far away, you had to either send a messenger - someone with a fast horse and a really good memory - or make a signal of some kind.

In fact signals were still used even after the invention of language as a fast way to deliver a simple message - like to warn your kingdom of an incoming attack. In ancient China, if an enemy force was spotted approaching the Great Wall the soldiers would light a beacon to send smoke across the sky. When the next tower along spotted the smoke they’d light their own beacon, and so on and so on, carrying the signal all the way along the wall to alert the Emperor. Smoke signals could send a message over hundreds of miles in a matter of hours, which was pretty impressive back then.

And this was one of the earliest forms of media/news which, combined with social communication like letter writing, has helped to create the social media that we have today. It might not have been the best way to form deep friendships, but it certainly helped connect people and build good alliances - which is true of many social media and networking sites today.

Lovely letters

Writing letters, on the other hand, is often a great way to create deep and meaningful relationships by exchanging intellectual ideas and deep feelings on pages and pages of paper. In the olden days, it wasn’t uncommon to receive a proposal of marriage by letter, or news that a close family relative had died or was coming to visit. People also had ongoing letter-writing friends - called a pen friend - who they saw very rarely, but often wrote to.

One famous pair of pen friends was Tacitus and Pliny the Younger, who wrote to each other around 80 AD. These two managed to capture one of the greatest natural disasters in history forever - the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii. Pliny wrote two letters to Tacitus to tell the tale of how his father died on the shores near Pompeii as the volcano erupted. At the time, Tacitus was in Rome and Pliny was 250 miles away in Misenum, so it would have taken some time to deliver the letters. But now they’re immortalised in history, which is why we can still read them today.

Before Twitter and text messaging, even before the telephone, the telegram was really the quickest way of sending messages to people across long distances.

Also, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir were the intellectual power couple of the 20th century and they wrote to each other consistently throughout their relationship, sharing ideas, stories and thoughts. And writing them down meant they were better considered and clearer, which helped their face-to-face conversations go deeper too.  

Ultimately pen friends often became close and intellectually valuable friendships, and letters are really just the non-electronic cousins of things like emails and Facebook messages.

Tattling telegrams

Before Twitter and text messaging, even before the telephone, the telegram was really the quickest way of sending messages to people across long distances. But telegrams were quite expensive to send as they’d charge you for every word you wrote - so you’d probably do your best to avoid sending your friend an essay this way.

Whilst you were unlikely to form a friendship by telegram, some vitally important and world-changing messages were delivered this way. For example, Dr Crippen, an American-born homoeopathic doctor, was one of the first criminals to be convicted with the help of the telegram. Following the murder of his wife Cora at their home in London in January 1910, Dr Crippen and his lover escaped on a ferry to Canada - but they were spotted by the ship's captain, who sent a telegram to Scotland Yard just before the ship lost reception. A police officer then took a faster ship to Canada and arrested Dr Crippen on arrival! Boom.

Interestingly, the shortest telegram ever was from the Irish writer Oscar Wilde. He was living in Paris and he cabled his publisher in Britain to see how his new book was doing. The message simply read: ‘?’ And the publisher cabled back: ‘!’ Not much different from a quick emoji exchange really.

So, does friendship have to be face-to-face?

The methods might have changed, but the same principle still applies - you don’t have to be face-to-face with someone in order to have a friendship. The real question is about how meaningful those relationships are, and whether they’ll stay strong if they’re only online. What do you think?

Could online friendships be making you more lonely?

What kind of stuff do you share on facebook? And how often do you post? These things might be an indicator of how happy and fulfilled you are… or aren’t.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn8fewQlnTU

There are over 81 million fake profiles on Facebook.

4 reasons introverts prefer online friends

If you find being with people quite tiring and need a good chunk of time to yourself each day to recharge, you might be what's known as an introvert. (And even if you’re not, you probably know someone who is.) So having a lot of friends online can be a good way to interact with others without the pressure that real-life conversations can bring...

• Chatting online means no eye contact, no physical touch, no one watching you - it’s just you and your phone, curled up on the sofa or in your room. You can still get to know people but on your own terms. And when you’re tired of talking you can just switch off and take a break, without seeming rude. It also means that when you do have to go out into the real world, you’ve got more energy left and can make the most of those face-to-face interactions. 
• When you’re talking with a real-life person you might feel tongue-tied, or worried that you’re going to say the wrong thing. But chatting online takes that pressure away because you can choose when to reply to a text or a Facebook message, so you’ve got time to think before you write. And what about those super-frustrating times when someone says something to you and you’re lost for words - then you think of a witty comeback about an hour later! Online, you have all the time you need to think of the perfect reply. And if you don’t want to talk, then you don’t even have to reply at all.
• If you’re quite a private person, you probably want to be able to control which bits of your life you share with people and when - especially when it comes to your feelings. But when you’re talking face-to-face this isn’t so easy - you might blush if you’re asked something embarrassing, or cry if a friend is unkind to you. But if someone says something mean or strange online, your face can react however it wants to - they’ll never know. A simple emoji will keep your true feelings completely anonymous.
• Striking up a conversation with a new friend can be hard - who knows how much you’ll have in common, and nothing’s worse than an awkward silence. But when you choose your online friends you can look at the kind of things they like and what they post or Tweet about before you talk to them. This gives you conversational ammunition, so you don’t ever need to run out of things to say. (Plus you don’t have to worry as much about looking silly in front of people who don’t think Star Wars is quite as cool as you do.) Having friendships online can be a really good way to give you confidence in talking with new people, as well as helping you choose friends that match you and your interests the best.

Can Facebook make you a friend-magnet?

When we go online, there’s no limit to the number of people who can read our posts, respond to our Tweets, game with us, or comment on our Instagram pics. So surely that means we can gain a load more friends online than in real-life - right?

The numbers definitely look promising - Facebook has around 1.86 billion users around the world, with 500,000 new users joining every day. That’s 6 new profiles every second! And every day 300 million people are posting and Liking stuff on Instagram, 150 million people are using SnapChat and 120,000 new people sign up to Tumblr.

So that’s a lot of potential friends to pick from - way more than we could ever meet in everyday life. And interacting with them online - through Likes, shares, Tweets, messages, posts, etc - is a lot quicker and simpler than a real-life chat.

But research actually shows that despite this time-saving approach to friendship, people don’t generally have any more friends online than they do in real life. In both contexts, the average number of friends we all have is 150.

So why isn’t the internet helping us get a bigger social circle?

Dunbar’s number

First off, let’s examine this 150 number more closely.

An evolutionary psychology professor at the University of Oxford, called Robin Dunbar, has done a lot of work studying all kinds of human societies and groups. And he’s worked out that most human networks are made of up layers - like an onion.

Your best friends are right at the core, then you’ve got a layer of close friends, then a layer of regular friends and finally a layer of people that you like but are less emotionally connected to. Anything beyond that is just people you sort-of know - like you’d recognise them walking down the street and might stop for a quick chat, but you wouldn’t go out of your way to meet up with them. And you wouldn’t really call them a friend, they’d just be an acquaintance.

When it comes to the numbers, Professor Dunbar’s studies have shown that most people have an average of 5 best friends in their inner circle, then about 10 more close friends, then another 35 regular friends, followed by another 115 in that outer layer. (And each layer contains the friends in the layers before it - so that makes the totals in each layer 5, 15, 50 and 150.)

Interestingly these numbers aren’t just true about friendships - they seem to be found in lots of different contexts. Especially that outer layer of 150. The typical size of an ancient hunter-gatherer society was around 150, many small communities in 18th-century England were roughly that size and it’s the average number of soldiers in most military companies. So it definitely seems like a magic number where people and friendships are concerned.

But why 150?

It seems to be about two things: our brains and our time.

The studies that Professor Dunbar and others have done - both on humans and on animals - show that the number of friends a being can have is linked to the size of key regions of their prefrontal cortex. That’s the area of the brain that deals with ‘mentalising’, which is the process by which we make sense of ourselves and each other - a key part of friendship. So we’re limited by how much mental space we have for making and keeping friends.

A recent study of Facebook users showed that people felt that only 27.6% of their Facebook Friends were really ‘genuine’ (close) friends. 

We’re also limited physically - by time. Between school or work, sleeping, eating, doing homework, etc, we only have so much space in our days for seeing friends. And if you try and spread yourself too thinly you end up having a much lower quality of relationship, and maybe even giving up on some friendships altogether.

Because we’re more developed than other species (like the monkeys and apes, whose upper layer of friends is only 50), we humans have tried to fix that second issue a bit, by coming up with ways we can meaningfully engage with more than one person at once. For example through laughter - a great group bonding mechanism. Or things like music, which can be enjoyed by multiple people at a time and can be extremely helpful in creating bonds - like at a great gig.

What about online?

In theory, then, social media should work like those other time-saving habits - meaning we can connect with more people at a time and so overall have a greater number of friends. And often it might feel like we’ve achieved that, when we glance at the number of followers, Friends or Likes we have online and see how many different people we’re connected to.

But anthropologists have discovered that, when you look closely, our online behaviour actually just looks like pretty similar to our real-life interactions - particularly when it comes to those 5, 15, 50, 150 groupings. A recent study of Facebook users showed that people felt that only 27.6% of their Facebook Friends were really ‘genuine’ (close) friends. And since the average Facebook user has 155 Friends, that’s just over 40 people - almost the same as that ‘regular friends’ layer. The study also showed that the majority of people’s postings were always to the same 3-15 people - again mirroring those real-life 5 and 15 inner layers.

So it seems that the 150 number isn’t just about a physical limit of how many people you can spend time with, which would mean we could invent some way around it - like social media. It’s about how many people you’ve genuinely got enough emotional and mental space to emotionally invest in - and that stays the same whether you’re online or offline.

In a recent study of 12-17 year olds 53% said they’d deleted comments from others on their profile, 45% had removed their tag from unflattering photos and 59% had deleted or edited past posts.

In a recent study of 12-17 year olds 53% said they’d deleted comments from others on their profile, 45% had removed their tag from unflattering photos and 59% had deleted or edited past posts.

The flip-side of friendships: cyberbullying vs. real-life bullying

We’ve been exploring whether it’s better to have friends online or in real life - but what about enemies? How can cyberbullying be different?

You can be bullied anytime, anywhere

If you’re being bullied in the real-world, there’s a limit to where your tormentors can reach you. Once you’re home you can shut the door. Or if you absolutely had to, you could move schools, or even to a different town. But there’s no such escape online, cyberbullies can get to you, wherever you are in the world - as long as you’re logged on, you’re in the firing line. Also, nasty comments made about you online can be seen by larger numbers of people, making it feel worse and adding to the humiliation.

You might never know who’s bullying you

In the real world, you usually know your bullies. In the virtual world, you don’t have to know them and they don’t have to know you - they don’t even have to live near you. One research study with a group of 11-16-year-olds showed that more than half of them had been upset or bothered by someone online who they didn’t actually know in real life.

This finding could have been down to the 'online disinhibition effect'- a theory which suggests that- for various reasons- people sometimes behave differently online to what they would do in person. For example, a bully might feel that they can say whatever they like about you as they can hide behind the computer screen and avoid getting into trouble for their actions. That said, this theory also suggests there might be a greater chance that an outsider reading the comments, could stand up to the bully as the internet might give them more confidence to fight against what's wrong.  

The video below offers some of the reasons why we have 'internet trolls'- people who deliberately try to start online arguments or upset others by posting offensive, controversial or off-topic comments:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLAWeH_81jI&index=62&list=PLLakUwanpbTdyxyh2PEEW4SKNEMEAMbhP  

It can happen more easily, even by accident

“I wouldn't say it was bullying. It's a bit more banter, like. It's not really too serious." That’s how one teenager describes the ‘baiting out videos’ that he regularly posts online (videos that name and shame individuals (supposedly) taking part in certain activities with negative connotations). But what he thinks of as harmless fun is actually cyberbullying. In real life, you could more easily set people straight and let them know they’re upsetting you. But online, people are less likely to realise the effect their behaviour is having. And what they might see as a bit of gentle teasing can, in fact, have a lasting and damaging impact - especially when others jump on the bandwagon.

Cyberbullying isn’t physical

A cyberbully can’t physically harm you - it’s a war of petty, spiteful words (or maybe images) that they’re resorting to. That doesn’t mean that they can’t cause damage, but generally, you don’t have to worry about them lying in wait to hurt you. As the old saying reminds us - sticks and stones do sometimes break bones! But not through the internet.

It can fizzle out quickly

In some ways, it’s a lot easier to ignore a cyberbully as there’s no physical presence to deal with. And all bullies - virtual or real-life - want a reaction and enjoy an audience. But you don’t have to respond to the things they say and do online - you can just switch off your phone. No reaction + no audience = no point. In a world of shortening attention spans, people move on quickly if they’re not entertained - so ignoring a bully’s efforts can stop them in their tracks.

You can prove cyberbullying

When someone cyberbullies you, you’ve got all the evidence right there in black and white pixels, which makes it a lot easier to do something about it. Take Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones who suffered racial abuse on Twitter at the hands of blogger Milo Yiannopoulos. She retweeted the abusive posts, asking for help from the Twitter bosses - and when they saw what was going on they permanently banned her bully. End of. Not everyone will get such a big response from so high up, but you still have options. You can block people and/or report any kind of abuse. And if all else fails you can shut down your accounts, change your phone number, or get a new email address. Drastic, but better than moving house.

One in five teenagers say they’ve experienced cyberbullying at some point in their lives and with the increasing numbers of social media accounts we all have, that’s (sadly) no surprise. But at the end of the day, whether it’s happening online or offline, bullying always has the power to destroy a person’s confidence and cause lots of hurt and emotional damage. When you look at it that way, it’s not so clear-cut whether a virtual or a real-life bully is worse.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder

Writing letters can be a great way to create meaningful relationships by exchanging intellectual ideas and deep feelings. Some people have ongoing letter-writing friends - called pen friends - who they only see very rarely but often write to. Ultimately, pen friends can become close and intellectually valuable friendships. Letters are similar to and are really just the non-electronic cousins of things like emails and Facebook messages.

It’s easier – especially for introverts

Online, you can still get to know people but on your own terms. And when you’re tired of talking you can just switch off and take a break, without seeming rude. Chatting online takes that pressure away because you can choose when to reply to a text or a Facebook message, so you’ve got time to think before you write. When you choose your online friends you can look at the kind of things they like and what they post or Tweet about before you talk to them.

Block and report

A cyberbully can’t physically harm you - it’s a war of petty, spiteful words. And, when someone cyberbullies you, you’ve got all the evidence right there, which makes it a lot easier to do something about it. You can block people and/or report any kind of abuse. And if all else fails you can shut down your accounts, change your phone number, or get a new email address. Drastic, but better than changing where you live.

Are real-life friends better than online ones?

A study found that people's emotional health can decline when they are being ignored on Facebook, with some users describing that their existence actually felt less meaningful. Sharing lots of personal information on Facebook can indicate that a person is lonely and is trying to encourage others to seek interaction with them. Could an overdependence on Facebook and online friends be damaging to our mental health?

Research shows that people don’t generally have any more friends online than they do in real life. In both contexts, the average number of friends we all have is 150. A recent study of Facebook users showed that people felt that only 27.6% of their Facebook Friends were really ‘genuine’ (close) friends. The number of friends you have depends on the number of people you’ve genuinely got enough emotional and mental space to emotionally invest in - and that stays the same whether you’re online or offline.

Online bullying can be really hard to escape because cyberbullies can get to you, wherever you are in the world - as long as you’re logged on. Also, people can behave very differently online. For example, a bully might say whatever they like as they can hide behind the computer screen and avoid getting into trouble. In real life, you would be able to let them know they’re upsetting you but online, people are less likely to realise the effect their behaviour is having.

• Friendship and your senses: 4 things you can only sniff out offline
• Are friends better than morphine?
• Are real-life friends better than online ones? Take this further...
• Keeping social media social
• Facebook friends and FOMO
• 5 ways social media is changing our brains
• The Friendship Paradox
• More than friends: the rise of online dating

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Comparing the Happiness Effects of Real and On-Line Friends

John f. helliwell.

1 Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Haifang Huang

2 Department of Economics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Conceived and designed the experiments: JFH HH. Analyzed the data: JFH HH. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: JFH HH. Wrote the paper: JFH HH.

A recent large Canadian survey permits us to compare face-to-face (‘real-life’) and on-line social networks as sources of subjective well-being. The sample of 5,000 is drawn randomly from an on-line pool of respondents, a group well placed to have and value on-line friendships. We find three key results. First, the number of real-life friends is positively correlated with subjective well-being (SWB) even after controlling for income, demographic variables and personality differences. Doubling the number of friends in real life has an equivalent effect on well-being as a 50% increase in income. Second, the size of online networks is largely uncorrelated with subjective well-being. Third, we find that real-life friends are much more important for people who are single, divorced, separated or widowed than they are for people who are married or living with a partner. Findings from large international surveys (the European Social Surveys 2002–2008) are used to confirm the importance of real-life social networks to SWB; they also indicate a significantly smaller value of social networks to married or partnered couples.

Introduction

There are constant changes in the types of activities that people engage in, and in the technologies they use to establish and enjoy their social connections. For example, Robert Putnam’s analysis of movements in social capital in the United States over the 20th century showed that memberships in most US organizations, the frequency of dinner parties, league bowling, and many other types of social connection grew for the first 70 years of the 20th century and declined thereafter [1] . Some commentators and researchers argued that there were new types of social connection, possibly more effective in nature, that were growing and possibly offsetting the effects of declines elsewhere. One of the key examples offered was the substitution of on-line for face-to-face (we use this term interchangeably with ‘real-life’) friendships. The internet could thereby be seen as providing ways of enhancing or replacing face-to-face friends through the availability of on-line social networks.

How can the effects of these differing trends be compared? To judge the importance and value of differing forms of friendship requires a common basis for valuation. The broadening availability of data for subjective well-being offers one possible solution to this valuation problem. If it were possible to measure each individual’s network of on-line and real-life friends, then their respective contributions to subjective well-being could provide a way of comparing their values, and hence to judge whether the quality of social networks as a whole was growing or shrinking. Only very recently has there been a survey that provided comparable measures of networks of face-to-face and on-line friends, set in the context of a well-being survey of sufficient size and scope to permit comparable assessments of the two types of friends.

Literature Review

Friends and family are a long-established support for subjective well-being. Friends matter to happiness both for being potential sources of social support and for the pleasures from time spent together, whether at work, at play, or in activities for the benefit of others. Data from the Gallup World Poll suggest that having someone to call on in times of trouble is associated with a life evaluation that is higher, on a 0 to 10 scale, by almost half a point (page 298 in [2] ). This is more than the equivalent of increasing household incomes by 150%. There is also a dose-response relationship, so that having more friends is better than having fewer. Evidence from the Canadian General Social Survey shows that, compared to respondents having no close friends, to have 3 to 5 close friends is associated with life satisfaction 0.24 points higher on a 10-point scale, an amount that rises to.32 for those with 6 to 10 close friends, and to 0.43 points for those with more than 20 close friends [3] . Also notable is that happiness depends not just on the number of close friends, but also the frequency with which they are seen [3] , [4] . The same survey also asks about the number of close relatives, and the frequency with which they are seen. An interesting difference appears between friends and family. The number of close family matters more than the number of close friends, about twice as much up to 15 in number, with no gain thereafter, while frequency of seeing family contributes only half as much as the frequency of seeing close friends [3] . A similar result is found in US and other Canadian data analyzed by [5] , where it is shown that the frequency of seeing friends adds twice as much to subjective well-being as does the frequency of seeing family. The US and Canadian surveys in [5] also reveal a strong relation between subjective well-being and the frequency of seeing friends, with those seeing friends most frequently having subjective well-being higher by 0.5 points on a ten-point scale.

All of these results are based on fully specified models with many other control variables, although there is no doubt likely to be some remaining element of mutual causality between subjective well-being and the frequency of seeing friends. For example, those who are at the bottom end of the subjective well-being scale, and especially those who are clinically depressed, often reduce the extent to which they reach out to friends. Indeed social withdrawal is a key element in the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) [6] , as supported in subsequent factor-analytic work by [7] . Thus some of the strong positive linkages between friends and happiness may reflect causal influences running in both directions. This is likely to apply for both real-life and on-line friends, and hence should not affect our comparisons in this paper between these two types of friends.

There are few studies of the linkages between on-line friendships and subjective well-being. One study [8] found a positive relation between subjective well-being and number of Facebook friends among a sample of 391 college-age subjects. Another study of college-age respondents in the United States, while not directly investigating the links between Facebook usage and subjective well-being, did find evidence that Facebook usage was correlated with proxy measures of social capital, but only for those with relatively low levels of satisfaction with campus life [9] . An earlier study of social capital and internet usage in a sample of US adolescents [10] found no significant relation between subjective well-being and time spent on-line. Those who spent more time messaging with close real-life friends were happier. Conversely, the relation between on-line time and subjective well-being was negative for those in contact with strangers or purely on-line friends. A recent study of Egyptian students found no significant relation between life satisfaction and intensity of Facebook usage [11] .

Although there are many studies showing the effects of marital status on subjective well-being, we have not found previous attempts to see if the happiness effects of either real-life or on-line friends differ by marital status. Using two different surveys, we look for, and find, a large interaction effect in the happiness effects of marital status and real-life friends, but no significant differences for the effects of on-line friends.

We think that our results are the first to compare the happiness effects of real-life and on-line friends. Hence there are no directly comparable prior studies. Based on a meta-analysis [12] of fifty years of studies showing significantly more effective cooperation in conflict resolutions using face-to-face rather than written communications, we might conjecture that a similar difference might exist to differentiate the happiness effects of real-life and on-line friends.

Data and Summary Statistics

The primary dataset for the paper is the 2011 Happiness Monitor survey sponsored by Coca-Cola and conducted in Canada between January 20 and 31, 2011 by Leger Marketing, using their online panel LegerWeb. The sample includes 5,025 Canadian residents, aged 16 and over, drawn from all ten Canadian provinces. The survey focuses on subjective well-being, and has questions that cover self-evaluation of life and other questions that can be used to construct alternative measures of well-being. It also has questions on people’s opinions about how various elements in life contribute to happiness. A section called Canadiana has occasionally light-hearted questions such as what is the happiest job in Canada, with a list that includes Zamboni driver and lumberjack.

From our perspective, the most interesting questions (other than the ones on well-being) are those on the size of social networks, separately for real-life friends and on-line friends. This presents an opportunity for us to examine potential differences between these two types of networks, specifically in their contributions to subjective well-being.

We use regression analysis to relate measures of subjective well-being to the sizes of social networks, as well as income and demographic controls. We will also use control variables to pick up differences in personalities; such variables include self-reported stress, time spent exercising and contributions to charitable causes.

The survey’s primary measure of subjective well-being is an 11-point (from 0 to 10) life ladder , based on the question “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” This question, also known as Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Ladder, is frequently used in well-being studies, including the recent World Happiness Report [13] and many studies cited therein. We plot the distribution of sample responses in the first panel of Figure 1 . The mode is “7” with a quarter of the respondents. The next greatest concentration is “8” with about 20% of the responses. The sample mean is 6.8, significantly lower than for the Canadian ladder responses in the Gallup World Poll, as shown in figure 2 .3 of the World Happiness Report.

It is possible to construct two other measures of well-being from the survey. One is life satisfaction, based on the four-point responses to the question “To what extent do you agree with each of the following statements” that include a statement “I am satisfied with my life”. The four points are “strongly agree”, “somewhat agree”, “somewhat disagree” and “strongly disagree”. The second panel of Figure 1 shows the distribution. The mode, covering more than 50% of the responses, is “somewhat agree”. Another potential measure is the response to the question “How happy are you at the beginning of 2011? Very happy, somewhat happy, somewhat unhappy, very unhappy.” The distribution of happiness is similar to that of life satisfaction: the third step “somewhat happy” has more than 50% of the sample. We will use these two measures of well-being for robustness tests.

There is also a question on the level of stress, specifically the response to the question “How would you rate your average daily stress levels? Very low, Low, Medium, High, Very high.” Its distribution is shown in the last panel of Figure 1 . The response of “Medium” has the greatest share of responses at 40%.

We now move on to the two questions on social networks. The first question concerns real-life friends. The exact wording is “How big is your real-life social network of friends?” The permitted responses, unless the respondents refuse to answer, include “Less than 10 friends”, “Between 10 and 20 friends”, “Between 20 and 30 friends”, “Between 30 and 50 friends”, and “More than 50 friends”. The distribution of the network size is shown in the upper panel of Figure 2 . A large majority of the sample, almost 80%, is in the first two categories (i.e., with fewer than 20 friends).

The immediately next question in the survey concerns online friends: “How big is your online social network?” The responses include “I don't have an online social network”, “Less than 100”, “Between 100–300”, “Between 300–500”, “Between 500–700” and -Greater than 700”. The distribution is shown on the lower panel of Figure 2 . A large majority of the sample either has no online friends (about 25%) or have fewer than 100 of them (about 50%).

The two network questions have different numbers of steps, and both have some steps with sparse responses (see Figure 2 ). We correct for these problems by combining the top two categories of real-life network into one single category with 11% of the sample, and the top three categories of online network into one category with 9% of the sample. This way, we turn the two network sizes into a comparable scale of four steps. In the case of real-life network, the four categories are “less than 10”, “10–20”, “20–30” and “30 or more”, with 44%, 34% 11% and 11% of the sample, respectively. The size of online network falls into “0”, “1–100”, “100–300”, “300 or more”, with 23%, 50.8%, 17.6% and 8.6% of the sample, respectively.

Table 1 presents summary statistics of other variables. The average age is 45. Forty-five percent (45%) of the sample are married; 15% in common-law relation, 5% dating, 23% single; the remaining 12% are divorced, separated, widowed or are unknown. The income information is based on categorical responses of income intervals. We estimate the midpoint of each interval under the assumption that income follows a log-normal distribution. We then assign respondents in each interval the corresponding midpoint estimate. The categories for the income variables are “$20,000 and below”, “$20,001 to $35,000”, “$35,001 to $50,000”, “$50,001 to $75,000”, “$75,001 and $110,000” and “more than $110,000”. The estimated midpoints are $13,605, $27,073, $41,895, $60,345, $87,895 and $136,849 respectively. About 15% of the sample did not provide income information. We use a dummy variable to indicate such a status in the regression analysis. Among those that have valid income information, the sample mean is $51 thousand. The average time spent on moderate to high intensity exercising is 1.78 hours per week. Close to 60% of survey respondents indicated that they currently volunteer or give time or money to charitable causes.

A second dataset that we use is the European Social Survey (ESS), a biennial cross-sectional survey of residents aged 15 and over within private households that is “designed to chart and explain the interaction between Europe's changing institutions and the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of its diverse populations” (The European Social Survey project). We use the cumulative file for rounds 1–4 (2002, 2004, 2006, 2008) that has 34 participating countries. The ESS does not have information relating to online social networks. Instead, it has information on survey respondents’ frequency of socially meeting with friends, relatives or colleagues. Figure 3 plots the distribution of the frequency, in the categories of “Never”, “Less than once a month”, “Once a month”, “Several times a month”, “Once a week”, “Several times a week” and “Every day”.

The ESS has two alternative measures of SWB, happiness and life satisfaction. The two underlying questions are “Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are?” and “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays?”. Both SWB measures are on a 11-point ascending scale from 0 to 10, with 0 indicating extremely unhappy/dissatisfied and 10 indicating extremely happy/satisfied. Figure 4 plots the distributions. Table 2 presents summary statistics of other variables.

By covering many different countries, adopting a different way of measuring interactions with friends, and by having additional measures of subjective well-being, the ESS increases the power and generality of our findings about the happiness effects of real-life friends.

Regression Analysis

Our regression analysis estimates the following equation

The measure of life ladder is ordinal; but as commonly found in the literature, little is lost if we treat it as cardinal. For example, [14] reported that the choice between probit regressions, which treats dependent variables as ordinal, and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), which treats dependent variables as cardinal, makes virtually no difference to the estimated relationships between happiness and important explanatory variables. In this paper, we will present results from the method of OLS; Ordered Probit estimations yield qualitatively similar findings. In terms of quantitative evaluations, our discussions will be based largely on the concept of compensating differentials: we will compare the estimated effects of social networks to the estimated effects of income. The ratios of coefficients are almost invariant to the choice of regression methods, as switching between OLS and Ordered Probit affects estimated coefficients almost proportionally (see [15] for an example).

The variables of interest on the right-hand side are the sizes of social networks in real life and on-line. In both cases, the size information is based on categorical choices from a set of intervals (the distributions are shown in Figure 2 ). We enter the size information into the regressions in two different ways. The first approach uses a set of dummy variables to indicate the intervals. This avoids making assumptions regarding the functional form of the relationships between network sizes and subjective well-being. The second approach imposes an assumption that the relationship is log-linear. To implement the log-linear approach, we turn the intervals into continuous values by assigning the midpoint of an interval to observations in that interval. In the case of real-life friends, the category “Less than 10 friends” is assigned a value of 5, the category “Between 10 and 20 friends” receives a value of 15, and so on. The top category “More than 50 friends” is assigned a value of 60. Similarly, we assign continuous values to the size of online network by assigning zero to the category “I don’t have an online social network”, the value of 50 to “Less than 100”, the value of 200 to “Between 100–300”, and so on. The top category “Greater than 700” receives a value of 800.

Table 3 shows the regression output. In all columns, the dependent variable is the 0–10 point life ladder. In the first column, we enter the network sizes as a set of categorical variables. In the second column, the network sizes are in (logged) continuous values. The first two columns show the happiness effects of real-life and on-line friends without the inclusion of other variables. In columns (3) and (4) we add a full set of control variables to be described below, and in columns (5) and (6) we further test the robustness of our findings by adding a measure of psychological stress.

Columns (1) and (2) provide the simplest and starkest evidence that real-life and on-line friends have very different associations with subjective well-being. Whether measured as categories or as continuous variables, real-life friends are positively associated with happiness, while on-line networks have a negative relationship. The strong positive effects of real-life networks are consistent with much other research. The strong negative effects of on-line friends are more surprising. The difference between the two effects is striking. Because the size and nature of friendships is likely to be correlated with age, gender, marital status, income and other variables, we shall do our main analysis of results using columns (3) and (4), which confirm our first results showing sharply differing effects of real-life and on-line friends, but largely eliminate the estimated negative effects of on-line networks.

The estimated effects of the newly added control variables are largely consistent with the literature. As commonly found, there is a positive and statistically significant income effect. The estimates of the effect are largely invariant across specifications, and suggest that doubling income ( i.e. , an increase of logged income by 0.7 unit) increases the life ladder by about 0.3. Later we will use this estimate as a benchmark to evaluate the quantitative importance of social networks. In term of genders, male respondents tend to report a lower evaluation of life. There is a U-shape relationship between age and life ladder: the life ladder falls as age rises but makes a U-turn in the 40 s. In terms of marital status, the happiest respondents are those who are in a relationship (married, common-law, or dating). The least happy group, which we use as the reference group, includes those who are divorced, widowed or separated. The group of non-dating singles lies in between. The difference between singles and the in-relationship groups is substantial, equivalent to the impact of increasing logged income by an entire unit. There is a strong negative effect associated with being unemployed, a positive effect associated with exercising and volunteering time or money for charitable causes. The estimated coefficients on the educational variables turn out largely insignificant, likely because the control variables already include measure of household income and social-context variables that are correlated with education.

The sizes of social networks enter columns (3) and (5) in Table 3 as categorical variables of intervals. The reference groups that are left out are those that have the smallest networks, specifically “less than 10” in the case of real-life friends and zero in the case of online friends. The estimated effects of real-life friends are all statistically significant and quantitatively substantial. Compared to the group that has fewer than 10 friends, the estimates in column (3) suggests that having 10–20 friends increases the life ladder by 0.29 points, equivalent to the improvement associated with a 0.7 unit of logged income (or 100% increase of income). Compared to the same reference group, having 20–30 friends increases the ladder by 0.32 points, while having more than 30 friends increases the evaluation by 0.36. The estimates thus suggest a substantial non-linearity in the relationship between network sizes and well-being. The most substantial increase in well-being occurs when moving from the group of “less than 10” to the group of “10 to 20”. The marginal contribution beyond that is quite small. Columns (4) and (6), which treat network sizes as continuous values, also show positive and significant coefficients. The variable of network size is expressed in logarithms. The coefficient estimate is 0.19, equivalent to the well-being gain from a 0.44 rise increase in logged income. Doubling the number of real-life friends is equivalent to increasing income by more than one half.

The findings for on-line networks are strikingly different from those for real-life friends. Compared to the reference group that has no on-line network at all, having a greater number of on-line friends is not associated with a higher level of life ladder. If anything, the correlation is negative, generally not significant at the 95% confidence level. Column (4) uses logged continuous values to express the size of networks. In such a specification, the estimated effect from the online network is negative and significant, although it is quantitatively small (doubling the number of online friends has the equivalent effect of reducing income by 10%).

The regressions described above estimate the effect of the online social network while controlling for the size of real-life network. Given the positive correlations between online networks and real-life networks (the correlation coefficient is 0.25), we expect the coefficients for online networks size to become more positive if we remove the variables for real-life networks from the regressions. We performed this test using the equation of column (3), and it did indeed make the coefficients on online network size less negative, but they still maintain a negative sign throughout (though none of them has statistical significance at the 95% level).

The final two columns of the table add to the right-hand side of the regressions an extra variable: the self-reported level of daily stress. The inclusion of the stress variable increases the r-squared substantially (from 17% to 24%), but has little impact on the estimated effects of network sizes; nor does it change the contrast between the two types of network. These findings reinforce our earlier point that omitted variables, including those correlated with personality, will not put our conclusions at risk as long as their inclusion does not alter the key coefficients, and especially the relative impact of on-line and real-life friends. The equations adding stress thus provide additional evidence of the robustness of our results.

The next table, or Table 4 , uses the four-step life satisfaction and happiness answers as alternative dependent variables. For better comparability with the 0–10 point life ladder, we rescale the two variables so that they, too, have zero for the lowest level of satisfaction/happiness and 10 for the highest level. The estimates are similar to those from the estimations based on the life ladder. Real-life networks are important to satisfaction and happiness, while online networks are largely irrelevant. The biggest difference is that the estimated effect of real-life friendship is even greater for happiness and life satisfaction than for the life ladder. In the case of life ladder in Table 3 , doubling the number of real-life friends has the same effect as increasing income by more than one-half (exp.44 = 1.55). For life satisfaction, doubling the number of friends is equivalent to a doubling of income (exp.69 = 1.99), while for happiness it has the same effect as a trebling of income (exp 1.12 = 3.06).

Next, we split the sample into two subgroups: one includes respondents who are married or in a common-law relationship; the other includes the rest of the sample. This is to compare the importance of friendship and social networks in the two segments of the population. Our earlier results have already shown that both marriage and real-life friends contribute importantly to subjective well-being, and by somewhat comparable amounts. Our results also show that those who are single but dating are almost as happy as those who are living together, once again suggesting the importance of the social aspects of co-habitation.

Table 5 presents the split-sample estimates. Its first two columns use the life ladder as the dependent variable, while the other four apply to life satisfaction and happiness, respectively. For each of the alternative dependent variables, one column shows estimates from the married/partnered sample; the other shows estimates from the rest of the sample. The findings regarding social networks are similar across the measures of SWB. The sizes of on-line networks are largely statistically insignificant for both subgroups. The real-life networks, in contrast, have positive and generally significant effects on SWB; but there is a stark contrast between the married/partnered respondents and the rest of the sample. Real-life networks have greater effects for people who are not married/partnered. The estimated differences are substantial. In the case of life ladder, the estimated contribution of having more than more than 30 friends is 0.72 in the un-married/partnered sample; the standard error is 0.18. In contrast, the estimated contribution is only 0.14 for people who are married or in a common-law partnership; the standard error is 0.14. There is thus no overlap in the 95% confidence intervals of the two estimates. Regressions using the alternative measures of SWB show a similar pattern of difference, with real-life networks being significantly more valuable for people who are not married or in a common-law partnership. Finally, we note that when we separate the married group and the common-law group instead of treating them as a single sample, we find by and large similar relationships between real-life friends and happiness. Table 6 reports the estimates. In all cases, the point estimates of the real-life friends’ effects in the married sample or in the common-law sample are smaller than those in the rest of the population (in Table 5 ). This explains why we combine the married and the common-law population together as a single group, and compare it to the rest of the population.

We also split the sample by gender (male and female) and by age group (16–34, 35–49, 50–64 and 65 and up). Table 7 presents the estimates. The estimated effects of on-line networks are mostly insignificant, or have signs indicating negative contributions to SWB. Real-life friends, on the other hand, have positive and mostly significant estimates. The biggest exception concerns the age group 35 to 49, for which none of the network variables (online or real) have any positive and significant effects. In fact, the highest size of on-line network is negatively associated with life ladder, with strong statistical significance.

Finally, we split the sample along the interactive gender×age groups: young (16–34) males and females, middle-aged (34–50) males and females, elder (50 and up) males and females. Table 8 presents the estimates. Many of the estimated effects of the real-life network become insignificant, likely due to the drop in sample size. But they retain their positive sign with very few exceptions. It is worth noting that, among middle-aged females, having the largest size of online network (300 online friends or more) has a large, negative and significant association with SWB. The estimated effect is so large that it exceeds that of being unemployed by a substantial margin. One possible explanation for this association is reverse causality, with unhappy people extending greater efforts to expand their on-line networks or resorting to more intensive online activity that leads to greater network sizes.

Findings from the ESS

The previous section makes three empirical observations: 1) the size of real-life social networks contributes positively to SWB; 2) the size of on-line social networks does not contribute to SWB; 3) the real-life social network is more valuable for respondents who are not married or in a common-law relationship. We can test the robustness of the first and the third observations using the European Social Survey (ESS), a large international survey whose first four rounds (2002–2008) include more than 180,000 individual respondents in 34 countries. The ESS does not, unfortunately, have information about on-line social networks.

We will use the ESS data to estimate equations similar to equ(1), but without the variable for on-line networks. There are two alternative measures of SWB from the survey, happiness and life satisfaction, both on the same 11-point scale from 0 to 10 as is used for the Cantril ladder in the Canadian survey. The variable of interest on the right-hand side is the response to the question “how often do you meet socially with friends, relatives or work colleagues?” This measure of social interactions is originally recorded in seven categories: “Never”, “Less than once a month”, “Once a month”, “Several times a month”, “Once a week”, “Several times a week” and “Every day”. To construct categorical indicators with sufficient sample sizes, we collapse the survey responses into five categories: “less than once a month including never” (with a combined mass of 11%), “once a month” (9%), “several times a month including once a week” (36%), “several times a week” (27%) and “every day” (17%). We then include the categorical indicators on the right-hand side of our estimations to explain SWB.

Our regressions also include a conventional set of control variables in SWB analysis: age, age squared, educational attainment, marital status, labour force status and income. We also control for country fixed effects and wave fixed effects (The wave 1 ESS was conducted in 2002, wave 2 in 2004, wave 3 in 2006 and wave 4 in 2008). The country fixed effects remove cross-country differences in per capita income as well as the potentially different interpretations regarding the scale of satisfaction and happiness. We also use the general level of trust (the response to the question whether “most people can be trusted, or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people”), the frequency of attending religious services outside special occasions, and self-reported health status to control for the differences in social and religious attitudes, subjective health, as well as possible personality differences. We use Ordinary Least Squares, clustering errors at the country level.

Tables 9 and ​ and10 10 present the results. The findings for the control variables are similar to those reported in the previous section. Males tend to report lower happiness and satisfaction. There is a U-shape relation between age and SWB; those in the 40 s report the lowest happiness and life satisfaction. Compared to the divorced, separated or the widowed, being married or in a civil partnership is associated with higher SWB. The same is true for being never married, but to a lesser extent. Higher income is associated with higher SWB. We find positive income-SWB relation throughout the income distribution. The relation flattens out at middle and higher income, but the marginal contribution of income to well-being never falls to zero or becomes negative. In terms of labour force status, there is no significant difference between being employed and not participating. Being unemployed, however, is a significant negative factor with a large estimated effect. The SWB difference between unemployment and non-participation is similar to the difference arising from moving an individual from the lowest income decile to the 7th decile in the case of happiness, or to the 8th decile in the case of life satisfaction. General trust, the frequency of attending religious services and self-reported health status are all positive contributing factors to happiness and to life satisfaction.

Our variable of special interest on the right-hand side is the frequency of socially meeting with friends, relatives and colleagues. The estimated coefficients on this variable are all positive. A higher frequency is associated with greater happiness and satisfaction. For happiness, the greatest improvement occurs when moving away from the bottom (less than once a month) to the category of “once a month”; the happiness increment is 0.4 point. There is a further gain of 0.25 when moving to “several times a month”, then a further 0.16 gain to “several time a week”, then a further 0.17 gain to “every day”. For life satisfaction, the marginal improvements associated with the same step-by-step moves are 0.31, 0.26, 0.17 and 0.09, respectively in the same order. These contributions, especially those arising from a move from the bottom (less than once a month) to the next level (once a month), are very substantial, more than the SWB gain due to a jump from the 5th income decile to the top decile in the case of happiness, and equivalent to a jump from the 5th decile to the 8th decile in the case of life satisfaction. But it is important to realize that there is only about 10% of the population whose frequency of social interactions is at the bottom with less than once a month; so we are talking about moving away from a small minority that has a very low frequency of social interactions. If we focus on the move from “several times a month” to “several times a week”, the marginal contribution is more moderate. The income equivalent is a move from the 5th decile to the 8th in the case of happiness, and from the 5th to the 7th in the case of life satisfaction.

We now examine the difference between married couples/civil partners and those who are not in such relations. The findings from the Canadian survey indicate that the importance of real-life networks to SWB is greater for those who are not in a marriage or a common-law partnership. The ESS yields qualitatively similar observations. The second and the third columns of Tables 9 present estimates from the spilt-sample estimation, with happiness as the dependent variable. Table 10 has the same split-sample estimations with life satisfaction as the dependent variable. For both SWB measures, the estimated effects of social interactions are lower for married/partnered couples than for the rest of the population. In most cases, the differences between point estimates are greater than two standard errors of individual estimates.

The findings from the ESS thus confirm that real-life social networks (captured as the frequency of social interactions in the ESS) are positive and substantial contributing factors to SWB, with an importance that is greater for people who are not married or in a civil partnership.

We have used data from a large new Canadian survey to estimate the subjective well-being benefits of comparably measured networks of real-life and on-line friends. We have three main results. First, we confirm many earlier studies showing the importance of real-life friends to subjective well-being. Second, we find that comparably measured networks of on-line friends have zero or negative correlations with subjective well-being, whether or not allowance is made for the influence of other factors. Third, we find significant interactions between marriage and friends as sources of happiness. The estimated well-being impact of the number of friends is much smaller for those who are married or living together, suggesting that friends and spouses provide some similar happiness benefits. We also find that single people who are dating have subjective well-being significantly higher than those who are not. The effect is almost as high as for living together, which in turn is nearly as high as being married. These results also suggest that the company and friendship of marriage matter as much as the legal institution. Our Canadian results on the well-being value of networks of real-life friends are confirmed also for large samples of data from the European Social Survey. We also confirm from the ESS the greater value of friends for those who are not married.

Our results on the relative values of real-life and on-line friends are likely to be specific to generations, countries, and demographic groups, and to change as social and technological changes alter the possibilities for these two types of social connection to be either mutually supportive or inconsistent in their consequences for well-being. The overall importance of friendship to the maintenance of subjective well-being would seem to support more widespread collection of comparable data on the size and quality of friendships of different types, whether real-life or on-line, or on or off the job.

The limitations of our current results relate in part to the fact that we have only one survey comparably measuring the size of networks of real-life and on-line friends, so that our results might depend to some extent on sample or population specifics. As in all correlation analysis, there are risks that the influences we treat as running from friends to happiness may also be running in the reverse direction, or be determined by some third factors not controlled for. Our hope is that these difficulties are sufficiently shared by the data for the two types of friends that our comparative results might be expected to hold in more experimental contexts. We hope at least to have provided a useful first look.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research for research support, and to Leger Marketing and Coca-Cola Canada for data from their 2011 Happiness Monitor. The Cumulative Data Rounds 1–4 of the European Social Surveys was available at www.europeansocialsurvey.org/ . The Happiness Monitor survey data needed for replicating the results reported in this paper will be made available to other researchers by the authors upon request.

Funding Statement

This research is supported by the Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The corresponding author is co-director of that program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Posted on Sep 27, 2018

What is a Friend? The Real Life Versus Online Friends Debate

The word 'friend' is often misused and diluted. For many, online friends can never be as important as real life friends. But can this position be defended? Society has always applied degrees of friendship. This is reflected in our language. We talk about 'best friends', 'work friends', 'penpals', 'acquaintances' and other such tags, as if they are distinctions in a hierarchy. The tag of 'girlfriend' or 'boyfriend' outranks them all, as this individual is potentially a life partner.

These nuances of difference have always caused tension, but the rise of the internet has driven the debate into a new frenzy. For young people especially, cyberspace has become the place to make friends and find love. Our online interactions, with people across the world, are often more numerous and more suited to our own interests than their real life counterparts. Yet a sense of awkwardness pervades.If you want to find more info here http://1custompapers.com/ about interactions between students all over the world and new opportunities for them.

How Peer Pressure Demotes Online Friendships. It was my birthday recently. My private messages and profile areas on several forums were swamped with well-wishers. I received dozens of e-mails, Tweets and other social networking nods. One friend had spent an hour in Paint creating a birthday card for me. Another wrote a long online journal entry describing over four years of our online friendship. They were only two of the people, who made me feel special that day.

Yet my mother grimaced. She was only looking at the physical cards on the windowsill and there weren't that many. It worried her. Birthdays constitute an unofficial census of friends. Those still classing themselves as such will send greetings. Counting them provides the number of your true friendships. By my reckoning, I was well loved and reasonably popular amongst a wide cross-section of the international community. By her reckoning, I barely had any friends.

This serves as a perfect illustration of how online friendships can be dismissed. Yet amongst their number were the people who invited me into their homes, when I toured their country; the gentleman who secured a job for me, after I was made redundant; the half a dozen people who comforted me, in the early hours of the morning, when a bereavement had upset me; the person who had once sent me money, via an electronic bank, to pay an urgent bill (she got it back); the lady who spends hours proof-reading everything that I write; and the person (a practicing lawyer) who had looked over a book contract, free of charge, because of our friendship in an online game. Yet I wasn't to consider them friends?

What is a Friend? The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that a friend is a noun. It is 'a person (other than a relative or lover) with whom one is on terms of mutual affection; a supporter of a cause; a person on the same side in a conflict.'

Online friendships do fit the dictionary definition. Terms of mutual affection can and do exist between people known only to each other on the internet. New friendships are frequently formed between individuals supporting the same cause and joining a forum or chat group to discuss it. Unfortunately, as anyone posting side by side in a flame war may testify, internet friends can also be on the same side in a conflict.

The usual point, levelled against online friendships, is that nothing can replace physical presence. Body language accounts for much of human communication, as does shared experience. But the definition of friendship does not include immediate proximity. If it did, then any friend moving away from your hometown should be automatically struck off the Christmas card list. Also life experience occurs as long as we are alive. It doesn't stop as long as we log on and where individuals meet to interact online, that experience is shared.

What isn't a True Friendship? The definition of 'friend' was commonly diluted long before Facebook ever added their button. In fact, it is often unashamedly applied where it's not valid. Any person who refers to their brother or sister as their 'best friend' has misused the word. A relative has a separate category, so is automatically excluded. In the same way, a friend cannot be described as 'family', however close the friendship.

It is the grey area of romance where the concept of a friend is most abused. A 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' may only be designated as such while the relationship isn't physical. As soon as sex becomes involved, then it has stepped outside the boundaries of friendship. The couple are now lovers. Similarly, stating that a husband or wife is 'my best friend' is also technically incorrect. All of the closeness associated with friendships should be implicit in the terms 'lover' or 'spouse' anyway.

Online friendships are not a feature of family interactions, as family members tend to know each other without having resource to a computer. As individuals meeting on the internet are not even in the same room, then they are unlikely to become lovers without first meeting in the physical world. In short, while perhaps not meaning more, a relationship with someone on the internet is a truer friendship than that formed with romantic partners or members of the family.

Is it Time to Drop the 'Online' from the Word 'Friend'? Friendship is a precious and beautiful attribute in our lives. When we touch a mind in conversation, or smile when we see their name pop up online, or laugh together over a funny picture, or gather for comfort and advice in a crisis, or amass for a group event in pixels, then we are with friends. Wherever there is mutual affection and shared experience, there is a friendship.

Perhaps it is time to drop the distinctions, which result in peer pressured hierarchies. There are no online friends, no real life friends, no work friends, no festival friends, no pub friends, no anything else friends. There are just friends and that is great.

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I love this. It’s funny how much I can relate. When I was younger I had so many friends that I could keep up. Real physical friends who truly cared and did things to show it. Now, I rarely hear from anyone. Yet, two of the people who take the time the most to message me and see how I’m doing, are friends from online. My “real friends” simply hit the like button on my bday or reply “happy bday” with no real effort. So don’t let your mom judge you, it’s a new age.

I have learned one thing though, it is important that you do try to be social outside the walls of the internet. It’s much harder but it’s important to communicate with humans even if it’s just being nice to your waitress or the cashier. Tech talks and meetups help me stay some what social.

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Are online friends as valuable as real ones.

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New research ( gated , sorry) by John Helliwell and Haifang Huang suggests the answer may be no, especially for those most in need of friendship. Depending on your perspective, this may strike you as a) revelatory or b) from the Dept. of “Duh.” The abstract:

A recent large Canadian survey permits us to compare real-time and on-line social networks as sources of subjective well-being.  The sample of 5,000 is drawn randomly from an on-line pool of respondents, a group well placed to have and value on-line friendships.  We find three key results.  First, the number of real-life friends is positively correlated with subjective well-being (SWB) even after controlling for income, demographic variables and personality differences.  Doubling the number of friends in real life has an equivalent effect on well-being as a 50% increase in income. Second, the size of online networks is largely uncorrelated with subjective well-being. Third, we find that real-life friends are much more important for people who are single, divorced, separated or widowed than they are for people who are married or living with a partner.  Findings from large international surveys (the European Social Surveys 2002-2008) are used to confirm the importance of real-life social networks to SWB; they also indicate a significantly smaller value of social networks to married or partnered couples.

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It sure caught my attention when you said that online friendship is good for the health of the person because it gives the person an opportunity to make friends and receive support that they find hard having in real life. If that is true, then I guess there really is no reason for me to stop my sister from trying this online friendship thing. She finds it hard to make friends in real life, and if this will help her, then she should go for it. Thank you for sharing.

Do Online Friendships Differ From Face-to-Face Friendships?

Will online friends make the face-to-face cut.

Posted May 29, 2020 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

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A lot of us had been reaching out to solidify connections with our support networks as we navigated our own personal lockdown living. Some of us also probably turned to the vast pool of online support options, as many of us felt the need to create a safety net or wider array of social and emotional support options.

When we’re faced with a crisis, one of our first responses might be to seek our support—there’s logic behind the saying, “There is safety in numbers.” It’s human nature to create and rely on a social support network and with the internet, we’ve been able to reach out to people around the globe and share our experiences over the past months.

Some of these relationships may have “heated up” due to the crisis situation we found ourselves facing. As we begin to acclimate to the new routines and work arrangements we’re entering, we may be wondering about our ability to maintain these close connections—as well as wondering about our interest in maintaining them.

What Makes a Friendship?

For any relationship to count as a friendship , several factors must be present. These include mutual affinity, mutual respect, and reciprocity. The most basic purpose of a friendship is to provide support, similar to family relationships in the best of circumstances. However, friendships are unique in that they are totally voluntary relationships—you can’t make a person like you or want to socially engage with you if they have no interest in doing so.

The three most common “motivating factors” for friendship development include shared interests, shared activities, or proximity. However, we also tend to subconsciously measure the potential “value” or “appropriateness” of a new friend by things such as their appearance, their status, their values, and their similarity to ourselves.

Our face-to-face social lives tend to be more conscripted by these factors than they do in our online lives. When we’re in an online environment, we tend to focus on individual qualities and experiences than these more culturally-bound or culturally-influenced factors.

It’s usually pretty easy to build an online support network through formal and informal pathways, whether you’re seeking advice on a particular topic or responding to others’ posts or to those who respond to your own social media posts.

In an online environment, we are typically seeking out people who share our hobbies, interests, or experiences. We want to connect with people who reflect our passions or our feelings about topics that we value, such as social issues, political issues, or contemporary culture. We also like to connect with those who are experiencing the events or transitions that we are experiencing, such as new mothers and home bakers. We also connect over hobbies, such as fellow kayakers, armchair travelers, or Disney World fans. Health and personal challenges also lead us to reach out to those who are facing similar things, such as 12-step groups or disease/illiness-specific support groups.

While few of us are actually going to meet up with online friends/real-world strangers, there is less concern about “how others see them” and more about what they mean to us and what we gain from the relationship. In addition, the more time we spend with someone, the more likely we are to begin to “like them” and feel a connection. If we visit an online support group or online chat group on a regular and consistent basis, the more likely we are to begin to see the group members or chat partners as “friends.”

Dark Secrets May Be More Easily Shared Online

Another benefit of online friends is the freedom we feel to share information with those that we are unlikely to ever meet in person as we don’t fear later shame or that feeling of “retroactive embarrassment .” It’s like the willingness to share more personal information with others in stalled elevators or in happenstance transient friendships that pop up over a vacation or summer camp, etc. There’s a greater sense of anonymity and less concern about “what will this person think of me?” We are unlikely to be seeing this person on a frequent basis, so we won’t be reminded of our vulnerability and personal revelations. Our “confessions” are limited to a containable space and shared with people we actually never have to engage with again, if we choose not to.

"Pandemic Friends" May Disappear When Pandemic Fears Subside

While some online friendships deepen over time and endure for decades, there has to be more to the relationship than just one shared preference or experience. Friendships that flourish require an investment of time, energy, and support.

The most important aspect of friendship longevity has to do with the ability of the relationship to handle the dynamic nature of individuals. People are not static—we are changing and developing every day. If a friendship is too brittle or based on a single shared commonality, it is unlikely to have the depth and resilience to thrive as each person moves through life. While we all have friends from different stages of our lives, and seeing them may take us back in our minds to that time when their presence in our lives was so valued, if we don’t have enough connections beyond that one shared thing, the relationship won’t endure.

Will Our New Online Friends Make the “F2F World” Friendship Cut?

When we’re only engaging in online connections, we’re focused on the similarities between us and others. However, when we’re thinking of moving to a face-to-face relationship, we may become keenly aware of the differences between us and our online friends.

Not only does the depth of the connection matter, so does our willingness to let the part of ourselves that we may have shared in pseudo-anonymity and confidentially online “show up” in our real lives. If the bond is built on a love of a travel destination, we may plan a destination meet-up. This can become an annual pilgrimage or the experience may lead us to realize that one face-to-face meet-up may be enough for a lifetime if that perfectly acceptable online friend turns out to be totally unacceptable as a friend in real life—for whatever reason that might be.

Another aspect of moving online friendships into our real world is that when we share online, we are doing so in the comfort and privacy of our own homes. We are controlling the audience, the setting, and our communications. When we build friendships in face-to-face settings, we are losing any sense of anonymity and our being “exposed” in a way that some online connections cannot survive, for whatever reason.

In essence, all friendships are going to be voluntary relationships and as much as we might like to be able to “force friend” a person, it’s not something we can force to happen. Just as some friendships are really reflections of who we were at a certain point in our lives, but nothing more, some online friendships will only be able to exist when they are restricted to the virtual world where we can share and be whatever we want with a sense of safety from more public exposure.

Suzanne Degges-White, Ph.D. , is a licensed counselor and professor at Northern Illinois University.

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