Assignment 5: Option 1

I consider a person I have never met to be one of my best friends. We’re Facebook friends and AIM Buddies. We share stories, pictures, and drunk dials. We’ve even been known to send one another a birthday or Christmas gift, yet we’ve never seen each other face to face.

Our friendship evolved out of a browser based MUD and very slowly at first. We were members of different but friendly guilds, so while we knew of each other we never spoke much. It is interesting to consider this aspect in terms of Wallace’s attraction factor of proximity which states that people are more attracted to one another the more often their paths cross. While we were miles away we would visit the same world on almost a daily basis, providing key opportunities to connect. Even then, we ran in different circles and while the opportunities were present they were rarely taken.

I can’t recall when it was we began really talking, but I remember a few messages back and forth via in game chat before moving our conversations to AIM. We spoke at length about common interests in music, health, fashion, hobbies, and art (common ground be another of Wallace’s attraction factors but not a focus here). I had made it a point to rarely disclose my picture nor ask an online friend for a picture to keep some distance between my “real-world” life and my life online. This was also to protect myself from negative perceptions of online friends, as I found all too often I lost interest in friendships when I found a buddy to be less than physically desirable. And, so it was with this precept that our friendship began to grow via AIM conversations.

Again, at a point lost on me, we finally chose to exchange pictures or one or the other of us had caught a glimpse of the other’s picture posted on some private forum or server dedicated to the game’s fan base. It was soon apparent that the attraction we had for one another based on common ground and proximity factors was quite enhanced by mutual physical attraction revealed by seeing each other’s photos (frankly she’s a looker and I will modestly say I’m not an ogre myself). Although, it's not unheard of to meet an attractive person in an online game, it was unexpected, especially by me.

While face to face relationships begin with physical awareness first and are found to furthered and solidified by proximity and common ground, ours began the other way around. The importance here is that although our relationship had evolved based upon personality characteristics to begin with, once the physical element was revealed our friendship really began to expand away from the game to other mediums of communication and more personal topics of conversation like family, friends, and love lives. In fact, considering other friendships I have made in that game, this was the only one that had ever stepped further into which I had felt comfortable sharing personal information and using other forms of communication. One could say my shallowness for good looks carries over to the online world, where they really shouldn’t matter.