Blogs are dangerous.
If you've been around the internet for any length of time, you can probably recount one specific moment to verify this statement. Blogs can be slanderous, they can be overly revealing, they can be harshly opinionated.
Blogs can cause a whole lotta trouble.
I ran into my own recent entanglement when a man whom I shall call "John" stumbled upon this literary playground. I tried my best to conceal the whereabouts of my collection of Musings, but John is one of those types of guys who prides himself on an ability to find any snippet of information on the internet, no matter how obscure.
John just happens to be the guy who I've been spending lots of time with over these past, oh, six weeks. Our first date was April Fool's Day and we've made it a pretty regular occurrence since then. Our meetings thus far have been great occasions to get to know one another, but now it appears John knows a whole lot more about me than I do him.
Now, I've always been a pretty open person, and this blog is a very revealing account of many facets of my life. I'm proud of and/or accept every characteristic I've experienced and don't mind airing out all my dirty laundry for the world to see. The trouble comes when I write about all my silly hopes and dreams (okay they're not really silly) of having weddings and babies and other scary stuff.
I admit all those notions can be frightening at first glance. I can't imagine the sheer terror a single man experiences when he feels like a woman is trying to suffocate the very essence of his masculinity and independence. The fact is, every girl has sugar plum visions of wedding dresses and babies dancing in her head. Unfortunately, men perceive these aspirations to mean we want to hog tie them, drag them to the altar and force them to say "I do" with a shotgun pointed to the head.
Like lots of bloggers, I'm faced with the dilemma: self censor or blog proudly and suffer the consequences. I've always erred on the side of caution, choosing not to bad mouth people or otherwise talk trash in a very public venue. Other than that, I talk about all kinds of stuff, some juicy and some not.
The situation with John appears to be just fine. He called me last week, with a trace of panic in his voice, telling me gently that he wasn't going to read my blog any longer. I was fine with that confession. I'd much rather have him learn about me from spending time with me than discovering the song of myself through the internet. I reassured him that yes, I am in fact having a wonderful time living the life of a single girl and no, I don't have any preconceived notions of where our friendship is going. I think I helped him understand that just because I envision being married and having kids some day, that doesn't mean I expect doing all that stuff with him. It's all good now, and I'm guessing we're going to continue seeing each other without the messy distractions of the blog.
Which is a good thing because I think I'm far less scary in person than I appear to be in my posts.
1 comment:
Can't say we didn't warn you to be careful. :-(
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