I am a big believer in online relationships. Most of my relationships, friendships and otherwise, have been there. I even got engaged to someone I met online (t

I am a big believer in online relationships. Most of my relationships, friendships and otherwise, have been there. I even got engaged to someone I met online (though we did meet in person a couple times first). However, it's not difficult at all to sort between shallow and deep social interactions. There's a massive difference between social media interactions and the interactions core to a deep relationship. I'll enumerate some examples here: Social Media: * Like * Write short reply * ...? Meaningful relationship: * Long talks (over phone, email, forums, whatever) * Discussion of intimate topics (not suitable for the public space of social media!) * Sharing experiences (and not in the "look what I did" sense of social media, but in the actually doing things together sense of, say, a gamer clan) * Some semblance of shared beliefs or interests (the focus of a forum, perhaps) So by all means let's continue building relationships online. But let's never confuse the shallow-as-possible interactions of social media with actually connecting to another human on any more than the most superficial level.