Friends With Fewer Obligations?

My hair stylist Sharon is a sweetheart. She used to give me these nice razor-edged layers that nobody else could. She would finish off with a few stray bangs in the front that I loved. I would always tell her how happy I was that I had discovered her and abashedly tell how she was one of the best things Boston had to offer. The nice fat tip would follow. Off late I have moved to a longer more natural looking mane. No straightening, no curling. Just the natural waves with the occasional trim. She is usually done in 10 minutes but as I gather my stuff to leave, she will wait with an expression on her face that tells me I need to add something to my “Thank you”. The tip I leave behind has remained the same, so it’s obviously not about the money. She expects the gushing. Or at least a “Nice job Sharon!”“It’s only a trim!” I feel like yelling sometimes but I realize this is my own doing. She is now a friend who shares with me stories about her son and her daughter and her marble-cake recipe, I am supposed to leave some comment.

We post and wait eagerly. Reload, reload. What would she say to this? What would he? The comment section keeps a blog alive, long after you publish your thoughts. The names and the no-names all become real to you. Even the Anons have a face. I can sometimes swear I recognize an Anon, the style and the type of comment they leave behind is almost always a giveaway. And sooner or later, the question will arise, “Should I meet him/her?” Though I have an email account that I use just for communicating with my readers, I have voluntarily come out to only one person so far. Though I did it enthusiastically enough, I think I regretted it at some level later. And I will not deny that I was more than a little annoyed when I heard that one person who knows who I am had let slip to another blogger my real name, resulting in one gleeful email from the little scamp, complete with references to where I work and what I have for breakfast. And though the scamp in question is one of my favorite pains in the neck, I was left feeling more than a little uneasy. More recently, a blogger I admire much suggested meeting up and I enthusiastically agreed. As I started to think about it, I recognized the old reluctance creeping back. I began to dig deeper. Why do I hold back from meeting and getting to know people I really admire and have so much in common with? I know of blogger friends who have met and befriended hundreds of other bloggers and are the happier for it, and yet, I can never see myself do that.

I think it all stems from the reason you blog. I used to write quite a bit before I began blogging and the stuff I wrote always elicited comments from friends and relatives that were nice to read. But they were my friends and relatives. The blog on the other hand lets people say what they like and every so often I will get an honest “Your prose is any day better than your poetry” or a “You have lost your marbles”. We are all already bound by the thoughts and comments we leave on each other’s blogs, do we need the personal relationships that meetings bring around too? Maybe the person who left that comment on my blog could say that because I am not really a friend he/she will exchange an email with tomorrow. Maybe it would have been a just a wee bit sugarcoated if we had actually met for coffee the previous weekend? And I think that this hits the core of my problem. I am afraid I might end up pulling a “Sharon” on you. You will be forced to come by, to leave some comment, any decent comment, if not a fat tip. And it will no longer matter if I gave you edgy razor layers or a plain trim.