“Don’t talk to strangers on the Internet!” The advice — nay, rule — was drilled into my young brain. I wasn’t alone. My brother got the same lectures, and so did, I’m guessing, just about every kid whose family had Internet access at home in the early 2000’s. In fact, this basic Internet wisdom is still being passed down today — and for good reason. The Internet can be a dangerous place and you can meet dangerous people who seem totally not dangerous at the time.

But then, sometimes, you meet someone on the Internet and it’s life-changing in the  best way possible, which I guess is why rules are made to be bent… and eventually broken? My LDBF (Long-Distance Best Friend) and I met in 2012 on Reddit. She made a post about something I could empathize with, I commented on it, and we hit it off from there.

We started off just private messaging, as we were both weary of how little we knew about each other; all we had really was this common ground on Reddit, but we both immediately felt that ‘oooooo friendship’ pang, when you just know. As soon as Snapchat became a thing, we stopped e-mailing and saw each other’s faces for the first time — I think it’s safe to say that girlish screams were had by all.

We’d had almost identical life experiences. We had the same sense of humor. Everything about our budding friendship screamed “Maid of Honor at my wedding.” There was just one tiny flaw in this wonderful friendship – I live in England and she lives in America. Since we can’t exactly swim the Atlantic and visit each other whenever we want, we’ve had to learn to maintain a best friendship across great distance. And, over the last few years, I’ve noticed some major differences between a long distance best friend and the local ones who you share an accent with.

Bonding = late, late nights. 

My LDBF friend lives on the east coast of America, which means she’s five hours behind me. There’s nothing more infuriating than having something huge happen at 9 in the morning and then furiously twiddling your thumbs waiting for it to be a semi-decent time to start spam-messaging her to tell her EVERYTHING. On the flip side, when you finally decide, “enough Netflix, bed time,” and then BAM a message comes through from LDBF and it’s already getting late and you have to be up early and promise yourself that it’s “just a few messages,” suddenly you realize it’s 3 a.m. and you don’t even care because you’re talking to your bestie. 

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