The internet has improved our lives by bringing information to the public. Even once-sacred mysteries are readily accessible via the Online Catholic Encyclopedia. Few today are safe from search engines, though some are considerably more Googleicious than others.
(Your Googleicious rank is based on how much dirt about you is available online. For example: Chris Brogan, who has 317,000 available pieces about him, including several videos, isn’t as Googleicious as, say, Emily Gould, whose 60,400 results come jam-packed with all kinds of confessionals and exposes from ex-lovers and colleagues.)
Googling is now part of the dating process. It’s like running a background check from the comfort of your own home.
Except unlike a background check (or a simple search on CriminalSearches.com), the whole wide web is often much more thorough, revealing even the most embarrassing details, as provided by friends, colleagues, exes, enemies and the person in question themselves.
Case in point: a couple of years ago my sister and I were using YouTube to look for a commercial I’d been in for Coca-Cola Asia when we inadvertently landed on a video of my ex-boyfriend singing and dancing at some corporate benefit. He and I had had a horrible, drama-fueled break-up complete with a bull run and front page scoop but had since made up and become good friends.
Of course, even my esteem for him could not keep my tongue in check when I lay eyes on him dancing like a chipmunk caught on an electric fence.
“Oh dear god, I can’t believe I fucked him!”
I wondered whether he knew that he was online, at the reach of anyone with internet access. Then, almost reflexively, ran a search for myself. The number of items that came up were limited, but my Googleicious score was pretty high thanks to my blog.
I grew up on an island in the Pacific. A girl can only do so much reading, jet skiing, scuba diving, lounging and partying. By the age of thirteen, I had built myself a world online, a world I naively imagined no one in my daily life would find. Sexcapades, god-awful poetry, rants, obsessive odes of desperate want, tales of crashing comedowns—all of it was at the world’s fingertips via Google.
Richard and I had just started dating at the time. I mentioned it to him because I didn’t want it to be an issue later. What I didn’t know was that Richard had already read everything. Possessed, he’d Googled all night long and retraced my life without my knowledge.
“I got more than I bargained for.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, mortified.
“I felt wrong. You’ve been doing this online thing for so long, who am I to tell you I feel at odds about it? How could someone so new to your life demand that you stop doing something you enjoy?”
“You wanted me to stop blogging?”
“I would never ask you to do that. This is who you are.”
I wanted to tell him that no, I wasn’t my blog, that blogging was a byproduct of living, like a foot print I can’t help making as I walk. I didn’t—there was no point in confusing him with my self-indulgent rant. He had the main thing down clearly: that he should never ask me to quit blogging.
Then I started writing about him.
T.M.I.
My friend Katerina recently ended things with her boyfriend after a drawn-out battle about her musings on the internet.
Nathan didn’t mind that Katerina wrote until his ex-girlfriend and baby momma started stalking her on the internet. Now, Nathan’s ex knows everything about his new life with Katerina: the good, the bad and the downright mortifying.
“Why do you have to give her ammunition?” he demanded of Katerina when they last spoke. “If you could just stop, she would be out of our lives!”
“He’s wrong,” Katerina told me later. “His ex will stop at nothing. If she can’t stalk me on the internet, she’ll stalk me in the physical world. It’s who she is. I’m tired of having the same conversation over and over with Nathan about how I should feel ashamed for posting such personal stuff out on the Internet for the world to see. It’s like it’s my writing that’s the problem here. It’s not. Nathan enables that woman to continue with this craziness, if it’s not my blog, it will be something else.”
My husband gets where Nathan is coming from.
“Well, first of all, he needs to grow some balls,” Richard says, leaning against the kitchen counter and taking a sip of his Coke. “Next time he talks to his ex, he needs to tell her, ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re reading, I don’t want to hear what you’re thinking, all I need out of your pretty little mouth is what time I need to pick up my child.’ Aside from that, though, I have to agree with the guy. I mean, there’s a line. No one wants their personal details all over the place. No one wants to walk into a room and know people are thinking, ‘O-M-G, that’s the boyfriend, he can’t keep it hard,’ or ‘he makes her cum fucking her in the ass.’”
“So you draw the line at sex.” I conclude, looking at him.
“Not necessarily.”
“Where do you draw the line?”
“At too much information.”
“How much is too much?” I ask and then, I invoke Emily Gould. “Shouldn’t he have known this would happen? Shouldn’t he have known that she, a writer, would write about him?”
BLOG VS. PRINT MEDIA
“At some point I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public space where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt,” wrote Emily Gould in her New York Times Magazine debut earlier this year. “Even having to take into account someone else’s feelings about being written about felt like being stifled in some essential way.”
Gould described how she and her ex-boyfriend Henry fought about the things she was writing about him in her blog.
“I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative and Henry wanted to shut me up. His point of view was just as extreme: I wasn’t generously sharing my thoughts; I was compulsively seeking gratification from strangers at the expense of the feelings of someone I actually knew and loved. I told him that writing, especially writing about myself and my surroundings was part of my personality, and that if he wanted to remain in my life, he would need to reconcile himself with being part of the world I described.”
Henry eventually left her life. The guy after him, Joshua David Stein crucified her for blogging about their relationship in a piece for Page Six.
My husband thinks writing for “legitimate publications” is somehow different than blogging.
Former relationship columnist Matt Katz doesn’t agree. Beyond the fact that a blog has no restrictions on form and word count, a column and a blog are essentially the same thing: a writer, exposed.
I ask him whether his soon-to-be wife ever minded being written about.
“Nope,” he replies. “But she read beforehand.”
Smart man. Now that old media is merging with new media, it doesn’t really matter what kind of writing is going on. Essay, poem, column, song lyrics—if it’s in print, chances are that it will be online, making someone’s Googleicious score soar.
FODDER
My husband’s attitude toward my blog changed when my posts changed from the praises of a fawning girlfriend in the throes of passion to the musings of a woman trying to make a relationship work with a man who didn’t have a lot of time, whose family largely hated her, and whose desires in the bedroom were different than hers.
Few mind being praised, but no one likes being cast in a critical light. Suddenly, the blog took center stage in our fights.
“Going to your blog for him must be like walking into a party where everyone is talking about him,” my mother reflected one night during the worst of the fights. “Only instead of quickly shushing themselves, they keep right on talking as though he’s not there at all.”
It’s true—it wasn’t just me who was talking about him in the void of the web. I was engaging a roomful of people about our life and they were waging in with everything from helpful advice to, “BTW, AV, you left your bra at my place last night!”
Richard never asked me to stop, but he referenced the blog enough to let me know he was displeased.
“You know what?” he screamed at me once. “Forget it. Just go fucking blog this!”
And I did.
PASSWORD-PROTECTED
“I offered to make the posts that mentioned Josh inaccessible by password-protecting them,” Gould wrote, recounting the last conversation she had with her ex, before he detailed their affair at Page Six.
Stein’s response? “You should be password-protected.”
Of course, according to Stein’s piece, the fateful talk outside Gawker headquarters went a little differently. He told her his privacy was his, not hers, and she smiled and responded, “You should have known better. After all, I’m a blogger.”
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
How do you sleep with a writer?
“Carefully,” writes fantasy author Catherynne Valente.
First of all, you must be prepared to see yourself dressed up in her clothes. In drag, in costume, in spangly eyeliner and a fedora hat.
You have to steel yourself, and accept the following with equanimity: She is going to write about you.
It takes a strong person to bear this: you’ll see your private jokes, your secrets, your childhood, the angle of your penis, the heft of your breasts, your personal griefs, your complaints, your house and your profession ground up and mulched, composted and laid out bare, for anyone to see, in her books. Her books are naked, and she will make you match her. It will not be comfortable. She’ll use everything you are—but she’s fair, she uses everything she is, too.
Every time you touch her, she will store that touch away, to be accessed later, spooled out, smoothed over, given to characters she hasn’t even thought of yet. Every time you fight, she will mentally catalogue your turns of phrase. If that seems inhuman, well, she can be like that. Computers are not so ruthless about retaining information.
Whether a novelist, columnist, poet, essayist or blogger, if you hang with a writer, you will eventually become fodder. But are Gould and Valente right? Is it fair to say that anyone who goes to bed with a writer should be prepared to see themselves exposed?
“At some point or another,” Katz says. “Even if it’s two years down the line.”
“Has anyone written really personal stuff about you?” I ask him.
“I can’t think of anyone who wrote too much.”
I’ve been written about. I think now about the first time it happened, on a bathroom stall in high school (yeah, I’m old. Back then we didn’t have JuicyCampus or GossipReport). I remember I walked into the cafeteria and the entire room went silent. With all eyes on me, I cocked an eyebrow and gave a little wave of my hand as if to say, “shoo,” and sat down at my little group’s corner table, hell-bent on not allowing my face to betray the insane beating of my heart. Over the course of that lunch, at least 20 people came over to tell me what they’d seen on the bathroom wall.
I refused to go look at it because I wanted to actively deny the person who’d done it the pleasure of a reaction. But I forgot about it and, later that week, found myself looking up at the words. I can’t remember now whether it said I was a “Perusian” slut or a bitch or both, but I will never forget the other things people had written around it, things like, “You spelled her name wrong,” “UR jealous cause your boyfriend thinks she’s hotter than U,” “Is Perusian someone of Persian-Russian ancestry?” and “She’s the antichrist.”
It wasn’t pleasant, but it was kind of funny, too. And flattering, in a weird way.
It wasn’t funny or flattering when an ex-fiance launched a blog about all the reasons I would make the worst wife, including the fact that I can’t have children, which at that time wasn’t something that I readily admitted. But it wasn’t the end of the world, either.
But maybe I’m not being fair. Maybe it’s different for people who blog and who expose themselves on a regular basis than it is for someone whose online presence is minimal.
FRONT ROW
It’s hard to draw the line. When you love someone, especially someone creative whose self expression is found in words, you don’t want to be the asshole who sets limits.
At some point, my husband stopped reading.
I have to admit that when he first told me he didn’t read my blog, I was a little hurt. In a way, it felt like he was rejecting a part of me (so much for “I’m not my blog,” huh?). But now I can appreciate the space he’s let me have within our relationship for me to explore what I think and what I feel—even when it’s about him and not always entirely positive. He views my blog now the same way he does my nights out with girlfriends: a sort of necessary thing he has no business being a part of, though he figures largely in the conversation.
“If there is anything you need to tell me, I know you’ll have no problem telling me,” he said. “I don’t need to read your blog because I have a front row seat to your life. I get parts of you no one else will ever see.”
He does.
Still, every once in a while, especially when we’re apart for longer than usual, I’ll spot him on my site and laugh because he always skips to the entries with pictures.
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