I started signing up for friendship/language sites a couple of years ago and I have noticed that getting to know people from other countries can and normally is a fascinating experience. It's amazing how easily you can become attached to people you have never seen before and that maybe you'll never meet in a lifetime! You suddenly become dependent on that friend, so to speak, as if you could no longer live without hearing from that friend; in other words, a bond is made and somehow it seems unbreakable. Life just seems unimaginable without that friend!

However, as every coin has two sides, so does internet friend-making, a term I coined just now, on the spur of the moment, for want of a better term. And the bad side, if you will, is that, once you get get used to that friend and have become so attached, all of a sudden that friend may just disappear from your life, leaving a trail of emptiness and a void that seems to be impossible to fill again. You suffer the loss of a friend who, actually, you had never met before. That's something hard to understand, I mean, how can we depend so much on a so-called virtual friend?!

But, overall, making new friends on the Internet is a fascinating experience and I'm personally thankful to the bright minds who created this wonderful means of communication. Some of the friends I currrently have were made because of the internet and its fabulous way of making great distances shorter!