Joke backfires

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PilgrimSong

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I did an April Fool’s joke on a friend of mine. I’ve met her only once because she lives in another part of the country. I ended up hurting her unintentionally. I was e-mailing her about something else, and spontaneously added on the end of my message that my family and I were going to Africa to be missionaries. It was April 1st, and I totally did NOT expect her to believe it. I said, “I’ll write more on my blog later.”

I expected to get a reply from her, yeah SURE, you’re going to Africa. No reply came so I thought, okay maybe I’ll have a bit of fun. So I wrote on my blog about it. (I’ve since deleted that.) Then my husband had some minor surgery and we went away for Easter weekend after that. Yesterday when we came home, I figured I better 'fess up. So I did, just in case she did believe me.

Well. She wrote to me that I had caused her pain and that I had jested about sacred things. She told me to never do anything like that again…that in her world, friends don’t do that, etc.

I never saw this coming. Ever since I’ve known this person, I’ve felt she’s put me up on a pedestal. I don’t know why, but her perception of me is far above where I really am. She had been telling people all about what me and my family were doing, and was in admiration. I had no idea.

I’ve apologized in two separate e-mails but don’t know what else to do. We’ve had a couple other miscommunications recently that, though not this serious, made me wonder how well we really know each other.

Please pray that I will have wisdom to do the right thing.
 
Some people appreciate a good joke, some do not - it is part of becoming friends to understand which type of person you are meeting.

Apologize, don’t joke with her again, and then let it go.
 
I did apologize. The thing is, she IS the type of person who likes a joke. She has a zany sense of humor. That is why her reaction blindsided me.
 
She’s just embarrassed that she has to tell the people to whom that she was praising you that it was all a joke on her.

I would be embarrassed, too.

How about you send her flowers with another apology?

Maybe phone calls would be better than emails for this friend. 🙂

I’ve had trouble with emails on occasion. They aren’t always the best medium for communication.
 
Okay, first of all this person is not a friend. A friend is a person that you have a close and mutually satisfying personal interaction with. This person was an internet chat buddy, who obviously invested way too much into that relationship.

If said internet chat buddy overreacted to a stupid joke and no longer wants to talk to you, well, what have you really lost? How does it really affect your life? This was not a person you were hanging out with or doing things with. It was just a person you enjoyed talking to over the internet. For that matter, what would that person have lost if you did leave for Africa? You are not an integral, personal part of her life. You are not a member of the circle that makes up her everyday experience. Mostly it seems she would have lost her source for vicarious life experience and gossip.

If she wants to continue chatting with you, then enjoy that for what it is, and move on. If she doesn’t want to continue chatting with you, then accept that and move on, realizing that all you lost was a fairly anonymous online interaction.

As for joking about “sacred things,” some of the best jokes I have ever heard were religious ones. I’ll never forget Dane Cook’s “Christ Chex” joke as long as I live.
 
JPUSC said:
LOL, that joke doesn’t sound very funny.
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Basically, it was about being starving because of the fast before Mass, and seeing the EEM holding a whole bowl of hosts, and wanting to grab it, pour milk on it, and eat it like cereal, aka “Christ Chex.” I swear I nearly died because I couldn’t breathe for laughing.
 
grandiosa said:
Basically, it was about being starving because of the fast before Mass, and seeing the EEM holding a whole bowl of hosts, and wanting to grab it, pour milk on it, and eat it like cereal, aka “Christ Chex.” I swear I nearly died because I couldn’t breathe for laughing.
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I was talking about the original poster’s missionary joke…but while we’re on the subject, Dane Cook is overrated. :D:p
 
JPUSC said:
I was talking about the original poster’s missionary joke…but while we’re on the subject, Dane Cook is overrated. :D:p
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I agree with you about the OP’s missionary joke. And honestly, I only ever saw one show of Dane Cook’s so I can’t really comment. I just loved that one joke.

Anyway, I should probably let the thread get back to its original topic now. I seem to have a knack for dragging threads off track. 😊
 
Have to agree, it seems as if you have lost an internet chat buddy.
 
grandiosa said:
Okay, first of all this person is not a friend. A friend is a person that you have a close and mutually satisfying personal interaction with. This person was an internet chat buddy, who obviously invested way too much into that relationship.
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As sad as I realize this sounds while I’m typing it, some of my best friends are those I have met online. Heck, my dear boyfriend and I started as friends in a chat room. “Personal” interaction can mean chatting- and they have met, which is more than most internet friends get to do.

PilgrimSong, I think all you can really do now is wait. You’ve sent a few emails, apologized and explained- pray and wait. Religious matters are dearly important to many, and any jests involving faith may be taken as hurtful. If you haven’t heard from her in a while, send one last email and stop. Perhaps in a few weeks or months you’ll get back to talking to each other and it’ll smooth over.

Oh, glancing over the thread- phone might be nice too. If you’ve met I presume you’ve exchanged numbers. A more personal apology might work.

Wish you well :)!
 
Pro-Life Teen,

I knew someone would protest my classification of this relationship. The difference with your friendships is that you met online, but then you took it to the next level and it became a personal interaction. Meeting someone on the internet and having it turn into a personal relationship results in a friendship, or boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, that is real.

However, chatting online, living in different parts of the country (don’t know which country, but I assume that means at least a few hours’ drive apart), and having only met once… that is not a friendship. It’s an online chat buddy. It could become a friendship if the personal interaction became more frequent… but it’s not yet.
 
grandiosa said:
Pro-Life Teen,

I knew someone would protest my classification of this relationship. The difference with your friendships is that you met online, but then you took it to the next level and it became a personal interaction. Meeting someone on the internet and having it turn into a personal relationship results in a friendship, or boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, that is real.

However, chatting online, living in different parts of the country (don’t know which country, but I assume that means at least a few hours’ drive apart), and having only met once… that is not a friendship. It’s an online chat buddy. It could become a friendship if the personal interaction became more frequent… but it’s not yet.
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I disagree. You are putting too many constraints on a friendship. One can have all different types of friends. You even used the word chat “buddy”. A buddy is a type of friend. I consider all people friends, even if I’ve met them for the first time. It may not be a close friendship but it is, never the less, a friendship. And who are we to say how close they are. I think someone can have a very close friendship without ever meeting that person.
 
And I think some people want to say they have something without doing what it actually requires to have it, so they pretend that things that look like the real thing ARE the real thing, to soothe their egos and look better to others. That really is what I think is behind the way so many people overinvest in online relationships, and ascribe to them a seriousness and depth they do not have. If you have never met a person, you have no idea if anything they have told you is true!

There are many people to whom I enjoy talking online. But they are not my friends. My friends are the people I see face to face, who take care of my kids when I need help, to whose children’s birthday parties we go, with whom I discuss marriage, politics, moral issues, and whom I know I can call for help when I need it. And from whom I receive calls for help when they need it.
 
grandiosa said:
Pro-Life Teen,

I knew someone would protest my classification of this relationship. The difference with your friendships is that you met online, but then you took it to the next level and it became a personal interaction. Meeting someone on the internet and having it turn into a personal relationship results in a friendship, or boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, that is real.

However, chatting online, living in different parts of the country (don’t know which country, but I assume that means at least a few hours’ drive apart), and having only met once… that is not a friendship. It’s an online chat buddy. It could become a friendship if the personal interaction became more frequent… but it’s not yet.
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I have only met one person in ‘real life’ that I met online- my boyfriend. After 17 months of dating him. And in our almost three years, the total time I have been with him in person is about twelve days. I’m in the States, he’s a Brit.

We certain had a close friendship before we met, and were close as a couple before we met. If I’m remembering correctly, I agreed to date him without either of us having seen the other’s photo yet, even.

One can have a personal and deep connection with someone they have never seen in person. To talk to someone online, possibly for hours a day, brings something that is far more close than seeing a friend between classes for a few minutes while occasionally going to the mall.
 
Whatever the relationship, I think that the other lady has taken this joke hard, and that sort of thing happens… What more can Pilgrimsong do than she has already done? So now all there is to do is wait and see what happens, maybe emailing in a bit and saying, Hey, you’re in my prayers hope all is well with you… but sometimes people take offense and there’s nothing we can do about it.
 
How can one possibly have a personal and deep connection with a person about whom they know absolutely nothing, for certain, that they have been told, is true?
 
grandiosa said:
How can one possibly have a personal and deep connection with a person about whom they know absolutely nothing, for certain, that they have been told, is true?
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Um, trust? And how do you know things for certain about people in real life? There are many people who have been lied to by people they know in person. It’s certainly easier to lie online, but at the same time, being anonymous in that manner often leads to more truth than would be given in real life.
 
Or it allows people to project more easily upon those people what they want to be true, without any real-life interactions getting in the way.

Yes, people lie in real life. Eventually they get caught out because the people who see them in real life start to realize things aren’t adding up. Only the most accomplished con-artists can get away with big lies for very long.

I know things about my friends because we got to know each other slowly, in a natural way. Getting closer over a long period of time. And every time something happened that would verify or disprove what they told me, it was clear that I had been told the truth. Everything fit. No, I don’t know everything for sure is 100% true, but I have never had reason to believe they are lying to me. I can read their body language at the time they speak to me, and there are a lot of good indicators of truthfulness (or not) there.

If my teenage child’s only “close” friendships were online, I would worry about him or her and encourage interacting with real people. If I thought it was bad enough, I might even turn off my internet. Neglecting the formation of face-to-face, day-to-day relationships, in which one has obligations to the other person, in favor of nebulous online “sharing” that has the appearance of depth and gives a false feeling of intimacy is one of the unhealthiest things I can imagine. It’s a large part of the reason why our culture is failing on so many levels. People are living in sanitized fantasies over which they have total control, instead of learning how to deal with the sometimes messy, but ultimately more rewarding push-and-pull, give-and-take of real relationships with real people who are in their lives all the time.
 
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