How real are online friendships? How do you handle the inevitable?

If you don’t have a companion animal, and avoid all those Facebook memes of cuddly puppies, cute kittens and ridiculous antics of parrots, you may have flicked over some of TSRA”s guest posts recently.

What you may not realise is that those pets bring people together too.

Friends I haven’t met

Of course, any shared hobby brings like-minded people together. The power of Facebook and other social media sites is that people who like the same things—whether actual people, or hobbies, music, animals or books—find each other. And just as regulars feel they ‘know’ the Story Reading Ape, so we get to ‘know’ people we interact with on Facebook, Like on pages, or visit on blogs.

Many of my writing ‘friends’ I have never met, and I’m never likely to meet, in truth. Some of them I know by…