losing an online friend

[nero]

this story took place over 1 week, yet it feels like i need the context of my 30 years of this life to actually tell it in full. that's not happening so i'll try my best to touch on the most important bits.

i consider myself emotionally mature. on top of learning a lot from the people around me, i've been in a good amount of relationships, all of which i handled well imo. i've been on the internet for most of my life and had many, MANY online connections, some of which i consider formative events in my life. some of these are still active, most long dead, but i remember even the shortest of them. im saying all this to give the following sentence legitimacy: this connection was truly, truly, incredibly special and unlike anything i've ever felt in my life.

met a girl with the craziest backstory ever. i don't even wanna say too much cuz i dont wanna breach her privacy, also she didn't give many specifics. but daughter of a some obviously rich and influential man. 2 majors, plays piano, did ballet, martial arts, was media trained, went to etiquette class, moved so much she doesn't even know what culture she belongs to. she always says "i was trained to ___", literally sheltered anime princess type shit, but one who is so far removed from her father's ideas, who arrived to her own conclusions through reading, thinking and studying life. her life is so full and nothing like mine. but on some intellectual level we are the exact same person.

we clicked SO fast and SO much that it terrified me. all of her previous dates were arranged for her for mutual interest, she's never felt an organic connection like this with anyone. and then she mentioned meeting me irl.

this snapped me out of the fantasy and put the whole thing into perspective. i've been told this before, but never considered it a real possibility since i live in bumfuck eastern europe. but she obv has the means to just appear here one day which scared me. i started overthinking. our connection was so special that we didn't even need to talk about any normie shit. but in the context of meeting irl that part started being scary. i dont know who her father is, what shes capable of, i only know her first name, if its even a real one. and she was obv very, very into me.

so i withdrew. we were talking on a language exchange app and never exchanged any other social media. i privated my posts there, changed the tiktok username i gave her, removed my pics. i started being suspicious of everything and told her we probably shouldn't be talking.

in retrospect, she was reasonable and mature about it. she said she'd delete the app if she is making me uncomfortable. she mentioned it many times over the course of a few days. and i never stopped her. i just put on some weird distant persona, sent the :| emoji and ignored her.

then she deleted the app. knowing how online friendships go, on our first day of hitting it off i told her "our saga ends within a week". turns out manifestation works. for somebody who i knew for about 8 days, she completely derailed my life. i cannot stop thinking about this thing i lost. i go out and look at people in this shitty small town and nothing compares. the breadth of this girl was tremendous. our connection deeper than anything i've ever experienced online. i still hear her voice when i read words that she used. i can't replay her vms or look at the silly doodles she would send me because they cause me so much pain. i know irl we probably wouldn't have worked. i'm from a different world. she has 3 high level jobs and her life is packed. but i still wanted to keep her around as a friend, just to see how her life developed, to tell her shit i know she would enjoy hearing.

the only other means of communication i have is that i made her download overwatch which we played a couple of times. i keep sending her messages on battle.net, but she hasn't been online in days and i have a suspicion she deleted it. she did mention once that she was taught to cut people off, but was trying to not let her father's words influence her decisions. in the end she did what she said she would do. reading our final chats i was so unattentive, distant. she wanted to add me on spotify, she brought up topics that i ignored. i feel at fault, but she pulled the final trigger in not at least leaving a line open but instead burning it irreversibly.

chat, what the fuck do i do? i've been broken up with before. this feels different. after a breakup i usually kinda know what the person is up to. i see something online, hear something from a friend, our eyes meet in the streets long enough to give me enough closure. but this has a sense of "finality" (if thats even a word) that i only ever felt before when my dad died. i will never be able to tell her anything, never hear her voice again, never know what she's up to. i spent the last 2 days trying to search for her based on clues i have to no avail. it's like the 30 years i spent narrowing my field of view and lowering my standards, being hammered by my surroundings and life have suddenly been broadened to a point that is difficult for my psyche to bear. nothing around me feels good enough anymore.

[larvapuppy]

I'm going to come at this from what I think your friend's perspective might be based on my own experiences, so I might be a little harsh, but it's nothing personal. Apologies in advance for that. If I get any details wrong feel free to correct me, I'm just writing based on the info you've provided.

I've been blocked without explanation twice now by online friends who I considered my best friends at the time, because they were having internal feelings that I was unaware of (they didn't communicate them to me), or I happened to say something that they didn't like and they wanted to punish me. It shows a lack of respect for your friend and a manipulative nature to withdraw without explanation. My reaction to this is the same as your friend's; I took it the rest of the way and blocked them back, and have not spoken to them since. "Message received." By becoming withdrawn, you probably hurt her very deeply and made her feel like you didn't want her around. It's only natural that she would delete the app after being treated that way. It's not her responsibility to try to figure out what was wrong and fix it; rather it's your responsibility to communicate your feelings.

To be brutally honest, your connection was special and important to you, but you didn't treat it as such, so you lost it. It's reasonable to feel like things are going too fast if someone starts talking about flying to meet you after a span of only one week, but I don't think withdrawing was the answer. She can't read your mind, so saying that you shouldn't be talking to her is too vague and she probably just thought you didn't like her anymore. You should have said that you want to take things slow, or talked about your anxieties (her father, etc). Her father's status is probably a sore sport for her; she didn't choose to be born to a public figure, and she probably gets treated differently all the time because of it. You have continued that pattern by running away from her.

If I were you, I'd use the battlenet thing to sent a well-thought-out apology, and change back any usernames that you changed in order to hide, so she has another chance of finding you again. It's her choice whether she comes back to talk to you again or not. If she doesn't, at least you have learned something from this experience. A special connection like this doesn't come around every day so treat it like it's precious if you ever find another one.

You'll probably go through a mourning period where you feel depressed, but eventually you will start to heal and feel better, I'm sure of it. But you're right that permanently losing a friend is like a death. It's painful, and it never stops being painful, but you learn to live with it and move on to other things.

[hyena_the_nonhuman]

  You walked into an entirley preventable situation, sabotaged it because you were scared, and want a way to somehow undo that mistake. Mistakes cant ever be undone     Pls pls pls pls

PLEASE

realize that in real life there is no way to undo a mistake. Gestures won't work. She already has been hurt by you and won't want to be hurt again. What you CAN do is tell her why you did that, and make sure she knows it came from your own insecurity instead of something she did wrong.

We all make mistakes. Your life will keep on keeping on & I promise you that you will find love with someone who connects with you just like that someday. There is nothing inherently special about any particular individual. You are going to be okay. She is going to be okay. Hurting from this allows you to learn from this. I feel like you will probably be stronger and more willing to fight your insecurities from now on. 

[nero]

@larvapuppy you're completely right on everything. i dont have the space to go into detail, but i did communicate my fears to her. I didn't just withdraw, i told her that if she deletes the app it will be a giant loose end for me not knowing who i shared all my stuff with. she asked if I'd be sad or if it would just be a loose end and i told her i had a pit in my stomach from the conversation. she said she felt the same so let's move on. then we talked about random silly shit. over the period of the next day or so she revealed a lot more about herself and i told her im glad she did. but i still wasn't giving her the attention that i should have. she even said stuff like "you were a fresh air breeze" and "i will remember you" which just typing it out makes me want to bawl.

im positive that if she read everything i wrote on battle.net she would contact me. but I'm afraid that she's an all or nothing person and once she cut me off that's it.

i will meet new people, form new connections, i know. but i very much doubt i ever meet a person anything like her. the chances of this happening were already astronomically small and i let it go to waste because im a paranoid pussy.

i still remember single interactions from years ago, I'm sure this will haunt me to some degree forever. and im fucking scared of forever. i know enough hyper specific info about her that maybe someone with better sleuthing skills could track her down. but i also don't want to reveal any of that to a stranger because i know she's super private already, for her own sake but also her family's.

thanks for reading and the thoughtful reply, i cant tell this story to anyone else so it feels good to get it off my chest.