First you meet
Blog relationships start out just as any other relationship does; somehow you meet. It may be through someone else (linking from another blog post, comment or blogroll), perhaps it’s through some kind of mixer (Blog Explosion or Blog Mad), you might have heard of them and decided to seek them out (on a news or social bookmarking site), or they just started talking to you out of the blue (left a comment on your blog and you replied/followed). However you meet you still get to the same point – you were unaware of the existence of them or their website and now you are.
Your friendship develops
I guess in many cases the blog friendship is very short lived – you get the information that you need and then you leave. Sometimes the blog is so pretty or it contains so much excellent information that you are compelled to keep returning. Upon returning the friendship can go in one of two ways, you will contribute and offer opinions and support, or you will be a secret admirer (aka lurker).
Say you contribute and the other person responds, you might feel ambivalent about the situation, or you might feel like you connected with them in some way. In this world where everyone is always so busy and people keep things close to the chest I think that every bit of contact counts. Especially when you can share something that you have in common, or learn from them, or teach them something that you know.
The friendship takes a turn
Relationships rarely stay the same forever. There are those life-long relationships where you stay in contact, maybe the contact is more sporadic as your lives go in different directions, but you still call that friend when there’s big news. There are friendships that don’t officially end, they just drift away. There seems to be friendships that suffer damage and end, or they might continue, but not the same as they were before. There’s also friendships that become marriages, but apart from actually meeting a blog author and marrying them I don’t see the analogy for that one (unless it’s maybe going in on an online business together).
I’m sure that most of us have had the drift away blog relationships. I know that I’ve gotten to the point where I have 2000 unread articles in my feed reader and no hope of getting through them all. Something’s gotta give and if there’s a blog that you just haven’t been reading then I guess it gives. Or sometimes it’s the other person who drifts; they haven’t updated in a while or perhaps they deleted their blog – you don’t know what happened, it was anything in particular, but that friendship is now gone.
Perhaps there is a blog you’ve been reading since you started blogging and you’re still keeping up with it. I guess that would be my position with Just Listen; Owl was the first person to comment on my blog (apart from my husband), so that’s not something I’ll just throw away. He also has a busy job and a new wife so he doesn’t update his blog as much as he used to – it’s easy to keep track of his blog posts. However there are other blogs that I read and their authors used to read this blog. I want to keep reading their blogs because I feel like I’ve gotten to know them and I want to know what happens to them in this crazy journey of life. Sometimes, it’s just difficult…
The silent treatment
Have you ever had a friend just stop talking to you? Three people (in real life) that I would have called my best friends at one time or another (in years 4, 6 and 9 to be specific) just stopped talking to me one day. One of them did pay me some attention, most of it antagonising, the rest was just silence – I was completely ignored. Usually in cases like this I think there’s no retaliation to be had, you just need to accept that the friendship may be over and get on with things. Sometimes they get over it and start speaking to you again, sometimes they don’t even know why they stopped. It can be good to just forgive and forget, or as Debi Newberry says, “forget about forgiving and just accept.”
Blog relationships aren’t really like that though are they? You don’t see the person, if you get bored with a blog and stop reading it you probably think it won’t have any effect. Do you actually stop reading a blog because you were offended by something, but never tell the author? Would you do that in real life, ignore someone that offended you? Surely you would tell them that something they’ve said was unfair or unreasonable? Then again, I think most people are so non-confrontational that they do just let things slide.
If you wanted to keep up with someone’s life by reading their blog would you continue to do so? Would you keep reading, knowing that your effort to read their five posts a day will go completely ignored?
I don’t think I really take this as seriously as it sounds, it’s just something I’ve been pondering… relationships in this new interconnected kind of age.
