Confusion over porn friend (32m) who has become my (40m) regular friend

Okay, so this is a weird situation and I’m not sure if this is even an appropriate place to post this, or if I’m going to get hate over the nature of it, but I’m at a loss on how to navigate a friendship that started in such an unusual way.

We met 4 years ago on a porn exchange site. We share a harmless but embarrassing fetish and it was a fun to find another person who is into the same thing and to be able to talk about it, judgment free. Neither of us are into guys, so not having any interest in each other kept it casual. In the beginning, we just shared porn with each other, and all our conversations revolved around that, but then it turned out that we actually did have a surprising amount in common. Slowly we started talking about other aspects of our lives and it grew into more of a normal friendship, but with this additional “hobby.” Obviously because of this the whole friendship happened backwards, we started out with aliases and avoiding personal details and only slowly revealed the stuff friends usually start with, like jobs, where we live etc. The anonymity was honestly a lot of fun at first, and it made sense to avoid personal info like real names and social media accounts, since the last thing either of us would want would be to have someone share details of our fetish to coworkers or relatives and such, I mean, it’s not illegal, but it would be hugely embarrassing and unprofessional and social stigma could cause problems even over just regular porn.

He was actually the one to initiate exchanging real names and such, and over the years we’ve gotten to the point where we mail each other birthday gifts and know a lot about each other’s lives. The one thing we never did though was to actually follow each other’s social media accounts, even though we link each other to posts on them constantly, so there has still been this air of being “secret” friends.

Which is where the issue comes in. It’s been over 4 years now of talking to him every day about just about everything, and it’s started to bother me that I’m his only friend who he hasn’t added on facebook or twitter or anywhere else. Especially when he sends me links to stuff on those accounts all the time. My accounts are standard family and friend ones, so it’s not like they’re “adult” oriented in any way. A couple days ago I decided to do something about this, and so asked if he cared if I followed him on twitter. He told me he didn’t mind at all, actually seemed excited about it…but then he didn’t add me back.

There are probably a dozen reasons that could be why he didn’t, but I go back and forth between feeling like it’s because he wants to keep a “pervert” at arm’s length, or else it’s because he uses his twitter a lot more than I use mine, so he might see my account as not “cool” enough to follow, or possibly just doesn’t see there being a point in following it since I barely tweet anything and would probably tell him anything entertaining anyway. But for me it was more of a social gesture, a way of taking the final step towards normality or something, so it struck a nerve.

I didn’t message him last night like I normally would, it just felt too awkward and I think I just wanted to cool off a little because I didn’t know what to say and didn’t want to say something rash because I do value this friendship, it would be pretty hard to replace, honestly. So then this morning he sent me an email sharing some things he’d posted online and being really friendly and kind of apologizing for talking too much about something totally unrelated to any of this, which makes me feel like an ass, since he clearly picked up on something being off, even if he missed what.

I really don’t know how to talk about this, or if I even should. I’m inclined to just pretend it didn’t happen because asking “why didn’t you add me back” sounds like the ultimate in neediness and might actually be more embarrassing than anything else. I think the beginning nature of the friendship has just made this feel like a bigger deal than it normally would be.

TL;DR: Met someone on a porn site, ended up becoming close friends. It’s been 4 years of talking every day about absolutely everything, but we still just send each other links to our social media instead of adding each other. It’s starting to make me feel like the weirdo kid trying to hang out with the popular kid, and I don’t know what to do about it.