Friendships that take place online are not as meaningful as those where people meet each other face to face. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

To begin, most online friendships lack the depth associated with physical proximity, largely because they are rarely tested by shared adversity. To clarify, face-to-face friends often navigate everyday inconveniences together, such as helping one another during illness, lending money in an emergency, or accompanying each other through difficult errands, which cultivates mutual reliability over time. By contrast, online acquaintances typically interact only through curated messages and carefully selected shared content, seldom witnessing each other's unfiltered daily struggles or offering practical, hands-on help such as running an errand or sitting beside someone during a genuine crisis. Consequently, such friendships frequently remain superficial, sustained more by convenience than genuine emotional investment, and often dissolve once shared interests fade or one party stops replying.

However, this generalisation does not extend to online friendships that persist over many years and involve consistent emotional support. For instance, individuals who share a rare hobby, career path or medical condition sometimes forge closer bonds with distant online contacts than with local acquaintances, since shared understanding can matter more than mere physical presence. When two people consistently check in on each other's wellbeing, offer advice during hardship and maintain contact across years despite never meeting in person, the resulting bond exhibits the same reliability and trust that defines a meaningful offline friendship, regardless of how the relationship first began.

To conclude, while most casual online friendships remain comparatively shallow due to the absence of shared everyday difficulty, I disagree that this observation applies universally, since sustained and emotionally supportive online relationships can be every bit as meaningful as those originally formed face to face.