There is a friendship you have with someone you almost never see. You might not have sat across from them in years. You don't know what their apartment looks like now, whether they've cut their hair, how they carry themselves when they're tired. And yet you talk. Not through phone calls or scheduled visits — you talk in DMs: short bursts, long paragraphs, voice memos at odd hours, shared links with a single comment underneath.
This friendship is real. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The people who dismiss it usually confuse medium with substance, assuming that proximity produces depth and that screens produce shallowness. Neither is automatically true. Some in-person friendships are hollow performances. Some DM threads contain more honest disclosure than most dinner tables have seen in years.
What DMs do well: they collapse distance. They let someone in Tokyo reach someone in Lagos without the logistics of time zones mattering much. They allow for asynchrony — you can say something difficult and give the other person room to think before responding. You can compose, edit, delete. The written record creates a kind of continuity that spoken words don't: you can scroll up and see who you were to each other two years ago.
What DMs do poorly: they strip out the body. You don't see the face that reads your message. You don't feel the pause before someone speaks, or the way they lean forward when they're really listening. A lot of what we communicate isn't in words — it's in timing, in tone, in the micro-expressions that flash across a face before the response is formed. DMs can only approximate these things, and sometimes badly.
The friendship that lives entirely in DMs therefore has a structural limitation it must manage. It does well when the two people are honest writers — when they know how to put emotional weight into words, when they don't rely on ambiguity to avoid hard things, when they can read between lines without catastrophizing. It struggles when one person needs physical presence to feel safe, or when a hard topic requires real-time back-and-forth that asynchronous messaging can't provide.
There's also the question of what happens in a crisis. When someone you love is falling apart, DMs feel wrong. The medium doesn't hold the weight. You can send every right word and it still feels insufficient, because what they need isn't language — it's your actual presence, your hands, your voice coming from a body in the same room. The friendship that lives only in DMs reveals its seams most painfully in those moments.
And yet: millions of people maintain friendships that are almost entirely digital, and these friendships keep them sane, known, loved. They provide continuity across migration, illness, time zones, parenting schedules, and every other force that prevents two people from being in the same physical space. For many people — people with disabilities, people in rural areas, people who moved to take care of a parent — the DM friendship isn't a consolation prize. It is the thing itself.
The honest account of this kind of friendship holds both truths. It is real intimacy constrained by an impoverished medium. It sustains things that would otherwise end. It has a ceiling. It can still be worth everything.
What tends to make DM friendships work long-term is a foundation built elsewhere — either in a shared history of physical presence that the DM thread is sustaining, or in a relationship that has evolved slowly enough that both people feel genuinely known despite the distance. What tends to kill them is when one person starts treating the DM thread as a performance — curating, broadcasting, maintaining an image rather than actually showing up.
The friend you only know through DMs knows a specific version of you: the one you type. That version can be honest or carefully constructed. You get to choose, which is either a gift or a trap depending on what you do with it.