Charmaine Mankey was three months pregnant and didn’t know another soul who was having a baby. There was nobody she could ask why the short walk from the car to her college classes now exhausted her or why the smell of macaroni and cheese made her feel dangerously queasy. And her current buddies didn’t want to hear her describe how the early movements of the baby felt like the flutter of butterfly wings–at least not after the first few times.
Then Mankey, a computer specialist from Orange County, Calif., discovered the “December Moms,” a pregnancy e-mail list organized by the months women were due to give birth.
With the click of a mouse, she was instantly connected to more than 100 women with whom she happily shared every mysterious symptom and every icy jab of fear, such as when the doctor thought he had found an extra chromosome in an early prenatal test.
While she waited the two terrifying weeks for the results of her amniocentesis, her e-mail friends supported her with daily messages. “It was like sisters waiting with me for the test results,” recalls Mankey, who learned that the “extra chromosome” was merely a speck on the film.
Then, on her 40th birthday, an unsuspecting Mankey walked into a San Francisco restaurant for brunch. Waiting for her there were 40 December Moms who had flown in from around the country to surprise her. “Oh my God, I can’t believe people did this for me,” the stunned, tearful birthday girl kept repeating as she and her e-mail friends spent the weekend sightseeing. She drove home in a car overflowing with presents.
Not everyone who has made friends on-line gets thrown an awesome surprise weekend by her buddies, but the rest of Mankey’s story is not unusual. Women are embracing the Internet’s burgeoning electronic communities, where they sometimes find it easier to meet friends than they do in their own neighborhoods. For many women–who have felt isolated because of a move to a new town, staying home with children, working at home or simply because they are shy–cyberspace is fertile new territory for pals.
Although sociologists warn of the Internet’s potential to accelerate our social isolation and yank us away from our local communities, e-mail, in fact, has strengthened tentative, new face-to-face friendships, enlivened old long-distance relationships and spawned an exciting new concept of community. Women who have connected through on-line lists are flying around the country to attend cyberspace gatherings to meet each other in person.
Connie Miller is planning a June shindig in Orlando for the people on an Internet list for parents of children with diabetes. “We are now up to 100 families from five countries,” says Miller, whose 10-year-old daughter has diabetes. “We are all meeting for the first time. I know when I meet these women, it will be a big tearfest.”
For Miller, who has moved three times in the past few years–to Phoenix, Tucson and a suburb of Dallas, on-line friends mean “I’ve never felt that angst that I’m leaving everything behind. I know as soon as I get my modem hooked in, I’m back on track. I have a neighbor who has friends from kindergarten she has lunch with. She can’t understand that my best, deepest friendships are on-line.”
A new Stanford University study found that the more time people spend on the Internet, “the more they lose contact with their social environment.” But Miller is no hermit. She just hosted a neighborhood meeting at her Flower Mound home and says, “I know tons of people at the church or school.” She admits, however, “I haven’t really sunk my teeth into getting new friends. I haven’t felt the need for it.”
But pure cyberspace relationships aren’t as satisfying as a flesh-and-blood pal you can meet for a movie or lunch, contends Jan Yager, PhD, author of “Friendshifts” (Hannacroix Creek Books, $22.95). “E-mail friendship is a wonderful additional tool for friendships, but if that’s the only way, those friends are going to miss out on so many of the benefits–the physical comfort of hugging a friend, the way you feel when you see a friend, the sharing of physical surroundings and experiences,” says Yager. Without seeing each other, she adds, “you can’t feel the same complete sense of being accepted for your total self because who we are as a human being has everything to do with how we look, how we smell, how we speak and how we dress beyond the e-mails we exchange. It’s a question of liking the whole package that’s as important for friendship as it is for any relationship.”
Women seem to instinctively know this. Miller, a former department manager at Saks Fifth Avenue and soon to be director of public awareness for childrenwithdiabetes.com, sometimes drives 1,000 miles out of her way on vacations to meet on-line friends.
“It makes it real and to get a hug,” she says.
When Mankey discovered one of her cyberpals, Julianne Prokop, lived only 80 miles away, the two met and became close in-person friends, visiting once a month and chatting on the phone. Another virtual chum, Karine Boestrup, from Norway, flew over with her 6-month-old son and spent a week with Mankey.
And Tere Craig-Garren, from Jacksonville, Fla., now has coffee every Friday night with a woman from her Feminist Moms at Home e-mail list, since she learned they live just a few miles apart. “The list has enlarged my support network in real life,” Craig-Garren says. She expects some 30 moms to be in Jacksonville for her group’s annual retreat in November.
But when virtual evolves into face-to-face, the initial encounter often feels slightly awkward. “Maybe it’s insecurity,” suggests Craig-Garren. She wonders, “Am I going to be the person she thinks I am from my e-mail? Do I resemble what I sound like?” And there’s a brief feeling of disparity. Physically the friends are strangers, yet they know the intimate details of one another’s lives. But “once you put a voice and a face to the words you’ve been hearing, automatically those little barriers come tumbling down,” Craig-Garren says.
In fact, e-mail dissolves many barriers–from shyness to disabilities–that prevent people from becoming friends in the first place. LaDonna Martin admits, “It’s hard for me to make friends. I’m not a very social person until I get to know people better.” After relocating to Austin from Dallas, she felt disconnected and depressed, not wanting to leave the house even for a ride on the family speedboat on Lake Travis.
Then one night she was invited to substitute in a dice game where she met a woman with whom she felt an immediate rapport. Martin deeply craved this new friendship, but calling the woman up felt too risky. Instead Martin e-mailed her and sparked the beginning of a close relationship.
Mankey says feeling self-conscious about her appearance often inhibited her from making new friends. “I struggle all the time with not quite fitting in,” says Mankey, who often thinks that her clothes and makeup aren’t quite right. “In e-mail you can be a human being without the baggage of having somebody judge you for what you wear. . . . E-mail friends see what’s inside you first,” she says.
And e-mail cracked open a vast new world of hearing friends for Karen Putz, who is deaf. “I’m able to do so many things on-line that strip away the communication barriers,” writes Putz, a Bolingbrook family support specialist for the parents of deaf children.
She keeps in touch by computer with 18 women around the country on her e-mail list. Despite their closeness, Putz was apprehensive when one of the women, Miriana Ivanovic-Hoff, from Bloomingdale, invited her over. She worried about how they would communicate. But between her sharp lip reading and Ivanovic-Hoff’s carefully enunciated speech and gestures, the two became fast friends.
Friendships seem to take root and flourish more quickly in cyberspace, as if they were being sprinkled daily with liberal doses of Miracle Gro. That’s in part because women seem more comfortable revealing their inner selves on the computer. “Being alone and facing only a screen can facilitate kinds of self-expression that are very self-revealing,” observes Sherry Turkle, a sociology of science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a clinical psychologist.
In many e-mail relationships, women communicate once or twice a day, a frequency rarely matched in most traditional friendships. Most women would feel like pests if they phoned a buddy every day. But that reluctance evaporates with electronic missives, giving many people the daily contact they crave. And in cyberspace, there is no telephone tag, no forgotten phone calls. You can write your friend at midnight; she can respond at 10 a.m.
This intimacy fosters incredible support and amazing acts of friendship. When a woman on Putz’s list was unable to afford a bike for her son’s birthday, several members pitched in and mailed her the money to buy one. After torrential rains flooded Tina Ayers’ house in North Carolina, e-mail friends shipped her kids clothes and called the local Home Depot, which donated materials to help her rebuild.
Putz’s cyberbuddies throw each other virtual baby showers. Craig-Garren’s pals mail “comfort baskets” of goodies and they light candles at 8 p.m. every Friday when they pray for one another based on an e-mailed list of “needed prayers.”
But all that support comes with a price. “The cybercommunity is very, very time-consuming,” Yager says. “It can generate a couple hundred e-mails a day.” Out of a list of 50 to 100 casual friends, she says women may feel really connected to 10 or 20. “You are involved with the ins and outs of their lives on a daily basis. The information you have to keep track of is daunting. . . . You have to be giving out to all those women all the time and connecting into all their situations or you won’t get it (support) when you need it.”
She warns that people’s primary relationships with husbands, children and local friends can suffer. Women do joke about their husbands being “e-mail widowers” and admit that reading and writing e-mail can become addictive, easily gobbling up several hours a day. Craig-Garren’s group’s electronic chats, scheduled three times a week, can stretch from one to four hours.
But Shannon O’Hara, a computer systems analyst from Wicker Park, has only accolades for the way e-mail has recharged the relationship with her longtime friend, Mona Davies, in Tacoma, Wash. These old college buddies haven’t lived in the same state since 1979. But now O’Hara knows what Davies is cooking for dinner (salmon ravioli) and whether she has fulfilled her dream of being named volunteer of the week at her children’s school. “It’s been almost 300 weeks of failure,” notes a sympathetic O’Hara. Davies knows that O’Hara is suffering from a nasty case of blisters because she can’t find a good pair of walking socks.
“I can imagine myself in her house, seeing the kids coming and going, seeing the spats with her husband. I really do feel almost like I’m her next-door neighbor,” O’Hara says. And that feels very good, indeed.
FRIENDS
The pair: Kelley Shannon, 31, an associate marketing manager, who lives in downtown Chicago, and Stacey Wyche, 32, an advertising account manager, who lives in the South Loop.
How they met: They were in the University of Michigan MBA program and moved to Chicago after graduation in 1997. When a “third Musketeer” friend moved away, Shannon and Wyche became much closer. “We realized how much more we had in common when it became just the two of us,” Shannon says.
What sealed the friendship: “When I realized that we can spend 24 hours a day together and it won’t be too much,” Shannon says. “Her friendship never wears me out. We get along so well because we both appreciate having low-key fun. We can sit at home on a Friday night and watch videos and cook dinner instead of needing to go out to the bar scene.”
“I went through a recent painful experience in my personal life. Kelley was a wonderful friend through the whole thing,” Wyche says. “She was very good at making me think about what’s right for me without telling me what was right.”
Most endearing quirks: “Kelley loves anything that has lizards on it–clothes, pins, refrigerator magnets. If I ever see anything with a lizard, I know I have to get it for her.”
“We use the exact same expressions, sighs, and body language without realizing it, often at the same time,” Shannon says. “It happens a lot, and we always glance at each other and laugh. It’s very bizarre. Or I’ll pick up the phone to call her and she’s calling me. I can see it on my caller ID. These things freak me out–to be so in tune with a person.”
The best time they ever had together: “Stacey and I went to Martha’s Vineyard for a girlfriend’s wedding,” Shannon recalls. “We stayed in a condo on the beach and had a great time hanging out and laughing, taking walks, sitting on the rocks.”
For a good time: “We eat sushi once a week at our favorite Japanese restaurant and shop for shoes and clothes,” Wyche says. “If I ever move away, Stacey will have a lot more cash in her pocket,” Shannon jokes.
What they value most about each other: “Stacey is a great listener,” Shannon says. “Whenever I have things I need to talk about I know that she’ll listen to all of my thoughts–some people manage to turn the conversation to something about them and it goes off track. She’ll help me through a problem and give me encouragement or sympathy. If I’m having a man problem, she’ll say, `It’s not you. You’re great! You’re beautiful.’ “
“We laugh all the time,” Wyche says. “She’s very silly like I am. (One) Friday night I was telling her about two new vocabulary words I learned at a business meeting. We sat in her bedroom reading the dictionary trying to learn new words. We said, `Look at how pathetic we are.’ “
How often they see each other: They talk once or twice a day (“sanity checks based on what is going on at work,” Shannon says), work out and have dinner at least a couple times a week.
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Have you established a good friendship? Please write to us about it and we may feature you in “Friends.” Write to Marla Paul, c/o of WomanNews, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611, or e-mail Marla444@aol.com
