[arkades]

> My fiancee is an MD, so she has tons of very close friends all over the country from college, med school, residency, and fellowship that she only interacts with remotely.

So she remains close with people she underwent difficult, life-changing, character-forming periods with, who at the time, she was with for quite a few hours a day?

I mean, med school and fellowship people stay with you forever, even if you don't particularly like them. And residency? You're blood-bound, like it or not.

[learc83]

The argument is that without regular in person contact people will forget you exist as a human, this wasn't a more nuanced argument that physical proximity is one factor of many.

> if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer.

[arkades]

Tell me honestly: do you really interpret OP as stating that, if you're not physically around someone, they (restating a little bit to make clear how much this is unlikely to have been meant literally) will not remember that you are a real person that exists? That they will come to think of you as an imaginary thing?

Maybe just give them the benefit of the doubt and engage with what they were actually trying to say. If they meant something more extreme, they'll have every chance to double down on it, but no conversation is enriched by shooting down the least charitable interpretation of what folks are saying. Especially when "least charitable interpretation" means "I will take all hyperbolic and/or figurative language and read it literally." It's boring to read language written like legalese, and it's boring to see people getting criticised for not writing in legalese.

[learc83]

Tell me honestly: do really think that I thought the OP's argument was that people will literally think of you as imaginary.

Of course I don't.

What you've done is to take the least charitable interpretation of my argument by believing that I was using the OP's language of "real human" literally.

The OP's argument is that "if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer."

My interpretation of that is that they won't see you as a real person with whom they can have a real relationship with, and that you can't you can't maintain a social peer relationship without physical contact.

To best way to describe what I, (and I'm 99% sure the OP) mean when they say real person: You read in the newspaper that a man was shot. You know he exists and you may know something about him, but he doesn't feel like a real person to you. His death doesn't cause you grief the same way the death of a friend or neighbor would.