Penfriends

Trying to find and maintain a good international e-friendship is a lot harder than it seems.

 

First you have to decide if you care how old they are and which specific country they come from, or else you get literally hundreds of men begging for handouts and women offering marriage proposals.

 

{ Sadly most of these are from the poor African and Pacific Island nations, which does nothing to gain our trust or dispell our often mistaken media-created low perception of them. }

 

Then you have to wade through the many profile that are mostly :- 

i) too brief as to give no clue to their personality;

ii) too much that you already feel that you know and dislike the person;

iii) men clearly seeking romance instead of friendship;

iv) women bored of men wanting more than just friendship so now insist on women only;

v) fakes trying to lead you off and ensnare you to join premium dating websites;

vi) young teenagers desperate to grow up by faking their ages;

or vii) ones that have been placed a million years ago with a now defunct email address.

 

Then follows the sadly repetitive "getting to know you mails", where you basically repeat everything that you wrote on your profile and answer the same questions again and again. It is quite sad that in today's society the majority of people still believe that asking what you do for your occupation gives them a better judge of who you really are!

 

It is equally disheartening that often people who meet me can guess my occupation without every knowing or understanding the "real me". They pigeon-hole me with others of the same ilk and never get past that suited image, when in reality I am truly unique and not conforming to any stererotype you might chose to label upon me.

 

With a low batting average of only one reply for every ten prospective befriending emails sent out, it's a double blow when some of the replies come back as negatives, with comments like "sorry, I am only interesting in meeting gay guys and your not " attached.

 

And even if you do manage to make a correspondence last more than a few weeks, the blow falls even harder when they finally get married and / or begin to start a family and admit that they will have very little time to write in the future.

 

Receiving the annual email from those wayward friends are like the belated birthday cards from Great Aunt Hilder, more often than not without anything new to read but still enough to make you feel a little guilty if you pretend to just ignore it or don't send you own reply within the next couple of weeks!

 

However, I will continue to keep in touch with old friends, and hunt out for some new friends, as I always get a warm buzz when I get a great long email to read. Also some of the friendships that I have made online have blossomed into strong and lasting relationships with people that I trust, respect and value highly.

 

I think it was Sturgeon who said "90% of everything is rubbish" well that may be true, but I'm still prepared to suffer the masses, as often I have found in that last 10% that which is truly remarkable and certainly worth searching for.