Friendship is a very important, yet very subtle thing. We all have many acquaintances whom we routinely call “friends,” but who are really not particularly important in our lives. Perhaps they are people we work with, or whom we encounter in our regular activities. While we enjoy spending time with them, if they were suddenly to vanish, our lives would go on with little, if any, disruption.

Then there are the people who deserve to be called friends. This is invariably a smaller group of people. We look forward to spending time with them, to chatting with them, and to some extent to share some aspect of our life with them. Seeing them is not just a matter of convenience, as it is with the larger group of acquaintances, but something we actively pursue since it always brings us a small increase of happiness being with them.

Finally, if we are truly blessed, one or two of our friends grow beyond that stage to become “soulmates.” Not only do we enjoy spending time with them, but we share important portions of our lives together. When something makes us happy, we immediately share it with them. When we are unhappy, we console each other, either with advice or as a compassionate shoulder to lean on. We contact each other frequently to share or chat, opening ourselves much deeper emotionally than we would ever do with a more casual friend. These people are the second most important relationship in our lives after that of our nuclear family (which include our parents, spouse, children). Having one or two “soulmates” makes all our other relationships stronger, because it is very unlikely that we can share every aspect of our personalities and values with a single person, no matter how close we might be to them. Being able to share different aspects of ourselves with two or three people makes each of those relationships stronger, and more valued.

On a personal level, I have always been primarily a solitary person. As far back as high school and college, when I was not in classes I was home with my books and writing. There are several reasons why I have chosen such a lifestyle, but the end result is that while it has no effect on acquaintances, it made having friends more difficult prior to the age of computers. For the first four decades of my life, I could easily count the number of friends I had on the fingers of a single hand.

That is no longer true. Thanks to email, instant messenger and blogging, I find myself able to keep in touch with many of the people I consider friends much better than I was ever able to do so before, so that they can remain friends rather than slip back into the wasteland of *former friends*. I have not been in touch with a single student who graduated prior to 1995 since they graduated, but nearly a dozen of the more recent graduates have become friends whom I do not expect ever to lose. And where I had many fannish acquaintances prior to the past decade, some of them are now truly friends.

In the past two days alone I have chatted with two former students whom I hope will remain friends for a long time, and I exchange email with my closest friend on an almost daily basis. I don’t even need to belong to Facebook to have a richer social life than I ever had previously, and all without giving up a single minute of my reading/writing time. Long live the internet!