Once you have a solid foundation, text chat is almost as easy at maintaining that connection as in person conversation. Making that solid foundation requires a

Once you have a solid foundation, text chat is almost as easy at maintaining that connection as in person conversation. Making that solid foundation requires a lot of work though and not everyone has the communication (or empathy) skills to make it work. Has worked for me, but I'm an outlier in that I grew up on IRC chatrooms before more rich-text and composite media communication methods were available. Most people on this site in particular are likely to be outliers too: as the way we are communicating right now is as stripped down as possible and people will self-select for this.