Last fall, I made it through one dinner date with Max, a sweet filmmaker I met at a party, before he signed me up to get updates from the site he maintains with his brother and sister, on which they post their short stories, line drawings and MP3s of their family folk performances. Dan, a journalist I first encountered professionally, sent me his blog, featuring confessional prose about a recently shattered relationship with an ex-girlfriend whose identity and biographical information he revealed. Hey! Who doesn't have baggage? I guess I'd just prefer not to know its name and birth sign going in. To be fair, I have occasionally brought this on myself. Once, while pre-Googling a set-up, I came across his online journal, on which he made careful notation of everything he ate on a given day, and included a bio going all the way back to nursery school, reviews of every book that he'd read in the past two years and a lengthy description of his political views. In other words, it covered pretty much everything I might have hoped we'd chat about on those first awkward dates. It was like reading spoilers . . . for life . . . with typos.
But besides that, it ruins the whole game of mating, a pursuit that is often only winnable if you charge stupidly forward, blind to your swain's faults and peccadilloes until you're so chemically and emotionally entangled with him that they cease to be deterrents. It reminds me of the time years ago when I was set up by a friend with a man she told me was "brilliant and intense and so perfect for you." Oh, and he happened to be recently released from the hospital after a severe bipolar break. As I explained to her then, there is a chance that I will someday meet and fall in love with a man whom I later learn to suffer from bipolar disorder. However, the chances of my falling in love with such a man if I know about the condition in advance are much slimmer. So too, with Joe and Max and Dan, and with Jimmy, the man who sent me a blog that revealed his unending allegiance to the Eagles. Could I learn to laugh off some Don Henley down the road? Undoubtedly. Does it get in the way of my ever having sex with this man to begin with? It certainly did. I have met men who have sent me blogs with their baby pictures on them, blogs with photos of their pets. Don't get me wrong: I have pets, I have baby pictures! This is the kind of personal information I expect to unearth about anybody I might someday fall for. But the unearthing is really the fun that facilitates the falling, isn't it? When it's handed to me — and to the rest of the world — it's hard to find it particularly appealing. I am probably just fogeyish about an internet culture in which the more people who read your diary, the happier you are, but in my world, these kinds of revelations are the intimacies on which close relationships, not public spectacle, are built. And if Mr. Hither has seen fit to share his goddamn blog with me, then I can bet that he has sent it to every other human he's ever spoken to or accidentally bumped into on lower Broadway. And what if, against all odds, I like him anyway? What if it turns out that the way he turns a phrase about his housecat moves me to my core? What if I fall in love with a man with a blog? Well, then I guess I'll get stuck with a dude so fascinated by the goings-on in his own digestive tract that his ex-roommate's sister's husband is also kept abreast of them. I'll have to suck it up. But do us all a favor, blog boys: Keep it in your pants. At least till date five. n°
FIND MORE True Stories: Letter to Myself, Circa 1998 Ridiculous Tips for a Miserable Sex Life Talking to Strangers: We ask deeply personal questions to people we just met 
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