I don't mean a relationship as in man/woman (other combinations are equally acceptable), I just mean in the way of connecting with another human.
My best relationships exist online. I have work colleagues, some of whom I'd class as friends. But I don't socialise with them out of work. I don't have physical friends. I have people online that I would class as friends, but I don't see them face to face. That probably doesn't diminish the friendship but it's different. I can choose whether and when to interact with them.
It occurred to me today that my best* professional relationships are with people that I don't meet face-to-face. (Best being measured in terms of professional feedback.) I telephone them, I email them, I skype them. But I'm incredibly rarely in front of them, where perceptions and reactions can be instantly generated. Emails and skype can be re-phrased, deleted, changed before being sent; words out of my mouth cannot.
I struggle with face-to-face exchanges at work. I don't mean that as social anxiety, more that I am forgetting behavioural norms. If an email interrupts me at work, I can brush it off, ignore it for 5 minutes then deal with it. I cannot do that to a person at my desk - but I want to. And my reaction to them is negative. I can rant in an email, then re-word it politely before sending. But I cannot re-word what I say (at least, not without huge pauses). And I certainly cannot add an emoticon to lessen the impact.
On social media, I can scroll past the status updates that bore me, and read selectively. On forums I can choose the threads that interest me, and when reading them I can fish through boring responses and pick out the updates from the OP. I cannot do that to my mother on the telephone. She can be giving me gossipy updates about her friends, and my mind is wanting to scroll past that part of the conversation because it's boring. So I'm not paying her attention to what she wants to tell me, I'm concentrating on what I get out of the conversation.
I get the irony of posting this on a forum. But I think I've just had a revelation that my online self has taken over my entire personality. I need to address that. I need to use the internet as a tool, not to live my life. Thanks for reading this. Even if nobody replies, I feel better for actually expressing.
Anybody else get where I'm coming from? And without going cold turkey, any suggestions as to how I move forwards (e.g. book recommendations)?