This is what a real friendship is to me:

1) stability/history with someone

2) embracing of that person as an individual and ability to commiserate with them over time and across difficulties, or even differing ideas and experiences. It's sort of astounding to see how real friends talk to one another across disagreements. They commiserate.

3) ...valuing them in your life on that basis

All day long, for almost a decade-and certainly for the last year, housebound, anxious, isolated, angry, and sweatily, grindingly lonely - I bounce(d) between reddit (I can now say I'm a misanthrope-most days I can't tell if the worst of the internet isn't represented on reddit, or twitter...), twitter, and the internet community I've mentioned before that filled a void for about 4 years, provided a stable group of people to talk to-even some I've met-and then became a boring bully-rancid middle aged clique.

I post now and then on my alt fb to one friend I know in real life who has 200 friends he sees in regularly in real life and shoots the shit with online. In other words, he's never really alone. People want to talk to him. Because he is himself, that is enough.

When he posts about his life, he's cheered on or consoled. He's validated. People want to share their lives with him.

But me....Imagine paying someone attention for years and having them not like you. Just being a nuisance or a nonentity. Being ignored. It's more than humiliating...it's painful. You realize the ridiculousness of developing affection or admiration for people who acknowledge you to the extent than don't like you. They might even commiserate with your problems or embrace similar words of sympathy if they come from "other" people...but not you.

And that's my whole life, it's my pretty unilateral experience of all relationships, where nobody I respect has mutual need of me. It makes that basic desire to have friends so treacherous and self-defeating.

What he has is pretty normal for the averagely attractive person in my city. You have real life friends, and if you want to talk about a meme, your life, or current events online, they're there. They value you input, maybe your experiences.

I would kill for a fraction of that. I would kill if I had high school friends that wanted to keep me in their lives. I think about these women every single day and have for almost 20 years.

They moved on, got married, made new friends, had great careers, learned to drive anywhere, travel.

I never did, and there's no challenge or reward (esp. professionally) someone hasn't offered me I couldn't have done at age 17. It's humiliating.

I spend all my emotional and mental energy on people who might have briefly cared about me at a beginning of a relationship and then don't.

I can't build anything.

There's no trips with friends or long-awaited in-person reunions to look forward to if we ever "go back to normal" (ha - there's so much else wrong with the world...social breakdown will be the real disease), and that knowledge crushes me every. fucking day.

And now I've been suspnded after building up for volleying back when someone insulted me or posted something snide/trolled first (damn, I was slow on the uptake on that, and the other disturbing thing I realize now is that reddit mods read pms...kinda skin-crawling if you think about it); every sub, including the other FA/FAW subs, is one of transients who leave;

I haven't had a stable, positive group of friends, including online, to talk to other that the reddit subs for years, and even those changed or wore down about every 2 years. I was in them for 5.

Every other general interest sub I've been in where you just talk about local news, vent, personal problems, etc. - is eventually overrun with trolls who stick around to harass people, and transients. The people who write at length, talk about interesting things, are capable of empathy or even writing more than a zinger just leave. They go away.

And then our sub was banned.

It just fucking sucks. Everything sucks. The whole internet. I miss the internet being ar eal source of relief, and fuck, do I miss web communities without automods and stupid bans like this one.

If you relate I'm listening.