When you meet a friend you’ve never met

Over the past few days we have had a visitor at our home.

On Thursday, a blog friend flew her plane to a nearby airport. I met her there.

The arrival of a friend I've never met.

Yes, I met her there. As in, I had never met her before, and that is where we met for the first time.

There are many aspects of blogging that I never could have predicted. When I started blogging nearly two years ago now, I expected to write. My goal was simply to have an outlet for writing. That was about it. I never really considered who might read what I wrote. I also didn’t think about reading what others wrote, or following their lives through their blog.

And the prospect of making true friends through blogging never entered my mind. That concept was beyond anything I had ever considered. Blogging and making friends? Are you kidding me? The reaction to that concept is similar to the reaction to those who used the internet for dating a few years back. Who knows what sort of person you are dealing with? They are likely stalkers, murderers, or out to hurt you in some way.

And yet here I am, having hosted a fellow blogger in my home for several days. With my husband’s consent, I will add. Although he does not blog, does not read blogs, and does not know (he probably suspects) that I have a blog, he welcomed a person I had never met into our home. He is so trusting.

This is the third time I have met a blogger in person. All of them have felt like friends before we met. We know a lot about the people who write the blogs that we follow.

I suppose that there are frauds out there. It is just a matter of statistics. But when you read someone’s blog regularly, see their comments on your site as well as on other people’s blogs, I think that you get a pretty good sense of the person behind them. We all have read comments that we almost immediately identify as being written by someone we would not wish to meet. We probably have connected to blogs to which we do not return. But there seems to have developed a little community of bloggers who follow and comment on common blogs. These are the folks I feel as though I know.

Joyce’s blog shares her adventures as a pilot. After her recent retirement, she has been flying around the country, having landed in nearly every state. She has visited other bloggers as well as a woman pilot who shares her name. I admire her sense of adventure and I learned a lot about flying while she visited.

Although we got to know a lot more about each other while she was here, we were friends before her arrival.

My (nonblogging)  friends and family don’t get it-they look at me as though I am crazy when I explain how I know my recent house guest.

This is a concept only bloggers understand.

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