If you read my blog you know I share A LOT of information. I blog about guys, dating, family, etc. What you don’t know, is that one of the guys I blogged about (literally one of the first few posts I ever did about Match) found my blog and confronted me via email about it. Luckily, he wasn’t one of the losers I described (even if he had been, I don’t write anything that I don’t stand by) and needless to say I found the entire situation a lot funnier than he did. He asked that I don’t publish his email, so I hate to break it to you, but you’re not going to read what he wrote to me…and while I’m tempted to post my response to him, I won’t do that either (yet). But this article from Yahoo! Had me thinking about relationship blogging…
It’s one thing to do an online search for the name of a prospective date and find a few embarrassing photos or a mention or two in the local newspaper. It’s quite another to find the person’s blog. In fact, on our third date, upon hearing that I had a blog, my current boyfriend asked nervously, “So, uh, are you going to blog about me?”
Aside from the occasional vague reference to him and his willingness to help me pick out new computer gear, I haven’t. And he’s fine with that. My blog doesn’t cover dating or relationships, but plenty of others do. With more than 150,000 new blogs created every day, according to Technorati, the odds are good that even if you aren’t a blogger yourself, you might be dating one.
While it provides an outlet for sharing experiences and connecting with a community of like-minded people around the world, blogging also raises questions of privacy. How much of your personal life are you willing to share with readers? How much should you share? And how does that impact the people you date?
The downside to dating blogs
Says Rachel Hurley, a Memphis-based blogger who writes Rachel and the City, “The more personal my blog was, the more readers I attracted, but the more I wrote about people in my life, the more friends and potential boyfriends came to resent me for it.”
As a result, she removed several posts after the subject requested she take them down and eventually stopped blogging about her personal life altogether. “I now use a Tumblr site that pulls feeds from my Twitter feed and work-related projects,” Hurley explains. “My readership has gone down tremendously, but my life has become much less dramatic.” That solution works well for Hurley, because it gives her a creative outlet without creating tension in her personal life. If you’re concerned about upsetting other people, this could be a good compromise.
Aside from the occasional vague reference to him and his willingness to help me pick out new computer gear, I haven’t. And he’s fine with that. My blog doesn’t cover dating or relationships, but plenty of others do. With more than 150,000 new blogs created every day, according to Technorati, the odds are good that even if you aren’t a blogger yourself, you might be dating one.
While it provides an outlet for sharing experiences and connecting with a community of like-minded people around the world, blogging also raises questions of privacy. How much of your personal life are you willing to share with readers? How much should you share? And how does that impact the people you date?
The downside to dating blogs
Says Rachel Hurley, a Memphis-based blogger who writes Rachel and the City, “The more personal my blog was, the more readers I attracted, but the more I wrote about people in my life, the more friends and potential boyfriends came to resent me for it.”
As a result, she removed several posts after the subject requested she take them down and eventually stopped blogging about her personal life altogether. “I now use a Tumblr site that pulls feeds from my Twitter feed and work-related projects,” Hurley explains. “My readership has gone down tremendously, but my life has become much less dramatic.” That solution works well for Hurley, because it gives her a creative outlet without creating tension in her personal life. If you’re concerned about upsetting other people, this could be a good compromise.
I don’t use names (unless it’s discussed beforehand), I sometimes use initials and 99% of the time it’s only for good things. If people don’t want me blogging about them, I would hope they have enough sense to tell me. While I am a humorous writer and I have many talents, mind reading isn’t one of them. If people don’t want me blogging about situations that involve them or nonsense they write, maybe they shouldn’t be idiots…then I’d have to shut up, because I’d have nothing to write about. To be honest, I would love for someone to write about a date with me, maybe I’d learn from it and see how others perceive me, I think it would be rather educational.
The benefits of blogging
However, for some, blogging can improve (rather than impinge on) their dating lives. “Since my habit is often to peruse a lot of profiles without actually writing messages, it became an accountability issue,” says Karin,* who writes the Single in the City blog in Boston. “If I told my readership that I was going to message a certain number of guys or update my profile, I knew that I would actually have to buckle down and do it.”
She’s also found that blogging helps her think about her “thought process between dates, my impressions of the dates or even my rants when my dates have broken things off. Writing, for me, sorts out the emotions.”
Writing about dates is my way of getting through the emotional roller coaster of dating and it’s an emotional outlet. Some people have diaries, I have a blog. I think my life is too random and ridiculous to not share with the people that are interested. Also, I forget some of these stories sometimes, so I love to go back and reread them and laugh about it all over again.
Avoiding TMI
Karin uses code names for dates — a popular strategy that not only protects other people’s privacy, but it can also help protect the blogger from a potential lawsuit. Tina B. Tessina, Ph.D., a licensed psychotherapist who writes the Dr. Romance blog, recommends that bloggers “disguise [their] dates’ names and details… you don’t want to be sued for defamation.” She suggests that bloggers also consider writing under a pen name. But this can backfire if the blogger relies too much on a secret persona, reveals a few too many juicy details and later gets outed. Using your real name (even just your first name) keeps you accountable. I’m accountable, as a left-handed human being whose first name starts with an “M”.
Whether or not you’re blogging under a nom de plume, it’s important to think about what you post and whether it might be hurtful to other people. I’m the first to admit that a couple of my entries are harsh, however, most of them are about people that I don’t know, that acted in either an inappropriate or idiotic way. I would love to call them out in person, but that would mean I’d have to be in contact with them.
“Often, even though I thought that I was being very straightforward and objective when relaying a story about something that happened to me,” says Hurley, “I would be totally surprised when I included someone in the story who would come back to me and see the situation completely differently.” This is actually what happened with the guy that emailed me about his entry. He saw the situation completely differently than I did and while he probably felt better writing the email, the situation didn’t change, and I stand by my entry and my take on the events.
Avoiding TMI
Karin uses code names for dates — a popular strategy that not only protects other people’s privacy, but it can also help protect the blogger from a potential lawsuit. Tina B. Tessina, Ph.D., a licensed psychotherapist who writes the Dr. Romance blog, recommends that bloggers “disguise [their] dates’ names and details… you don’t want to be sued for defamation.” She suggests that bloggers also consider writing under a pen name. But this can backfire if the blogger relies too much on a secret persona, reveals a few too many juicy details and later gets outed. Using your real name (even just your first name) keeps you accountable. I’m accountable, as a left-handed human being whose first name starts with an “M”.
Whether or not you’re blogging under a nom de plume, it’s important to think about what you post and whether it might be hurtful to other people. I’m the first to admit that a couple of my entries are harsh, however, most of them are about people that I don’t know, that acted in either an inappropriate or idiotic way. I would love to call them out in person, but that would mean I’d have to be in contact with them.
“Often, even though I thought that I was being very straightforward and objective when relaying a story about something that happened to me,” says Hurley, “I would be totally surprised when I included someone in the story who would come back to me and see the situation completely differently.” This is actually what happened with the guy that emailed me about his entry. He saw the situation completely differently than I did and while he probably felt better writing the email, the situation didn’t change, and I stand by my entry and my take on the events.
The bottom line is be a normal human. Don’t send 85,000 text messages and then fall of the face of the Earth. Don’t send messages asking my chest size (or how ‘strong’ my legs are). Don’t be a jerk on a date (making fun of the overweight girl at the other end of the bar IS a d-bag thing to do BTW). Don’t stop contacting me without a reason and don’t assume that I will sleep with you just because you bought me dinner. If guys conducted themselves in a polite, honest, respectable manner, I wouldn’t have to blog about them.
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