Him, Me, and the Internet

posted 3rd March 2011    Written by: Bri    CATEGORY: All Posts, Bri, Love/Relationships, Season 4

Oh, the thrill of a new relationship; constant butterflies and nerves.  The thrill of learning how he kisses (amazingly), learning what kind of music speaks to him (anything in a 3/4 time signature), and learning what annoys him (waiting for things).  There has been late night conversations and early morning gingerbread coffee in his busted up college mug.  Swoon. Then, in the whirlwind and excitement, you discover he spent an early Sunday morning reading through 6 months of your blog archives.  Well, crap. Hi new boy, allow me to introduce you to every feeling I’ve had in the past 2 years.   Sigh.

Blogging used to be a private thing.  I’m fairly sure that I went months at first where the only person who was reading anything I wrote was my Grams (Hi Grams, you tech savvy woman, you).

Sometime over the past year, my online and offline life started converging into this definite shade of gray.  My real life friends found out I had a blog and some even started reading it. (Suddenly they understood why I always have my camera to document our lives.)  Then, I started forging relationships with bloggers and that blew my cover wide open.

Then, I took friendships forged though blogging, twitter and gChat and began meeting bloggy friends in real life and I love them more than I ever imagined I would, and then “blogging friend” becomes “friend”.  Blog friends become regular friends… and the dividing line between my online life and my real life disappears.

To date me, you have to be cool with the whole “internet thing”.

Writing is who I am.  This writing is me, not all of me, but it’s without a doubt accurate; the mess, the happy, the insecure, and the affirming.  So, I stopped freaking out about what Mr. A might have found in my archives.  If he wants to spend {cough} hours reading through my archives and STILL can’t wait to spend time with me, then maybe the whole archive reading thing isn’t bad at all.

He has seen a glimpse of how I process things.  He’s also fairly aware now that dating me, means he is getting written about.  Oooooops.

Hi Mr. A, welcome to the Internet.

 

[photo credit:  CarbonNYC]

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Comments (12)

12 Responses to “Him, Me, and the Internet”

  • suki Says:
    March 3rd, 2011 at 9:16 am

    :) RV knows what the whole deal is. In fact, he encourages it.

  • Bri - Habbala Says:
    March 3rd, 2011 at 9:22 am

    Mr. A is a fan of it too! The only problem he has is trying to keep everyone's name straight! I have a lot of friends….

  • amysjoy Says:
    March 3rd, 2011 at 9:26 am

    I'm so excited to read about your blossoming relationship!

    My Feller reads most of what I put out on the internet. I love sharing that with him and knowing that's he's cool with it, and I find it helps keep me accountable about not putting out passive-aggressive nastiness out there. It also opens me up to extra vulnerability with him because, especially when we first started dating, I'll blog more openly about emotional stuff than I'm willing/able to verbalize with him.

  • Kate Says:
    March 3rd, 2011 at 9:28 am

    SWOON.

    It's always nerve-racking when you start a new relationship and your online life is uncovered in the beginning. I had a similar experience with that a few months ago, but thankfully the guy was mad cool about it. But even now I still struggle with merging my real life and internet life together. I think writing for Stratejoy has helped me though because I'm able to reveal a lot to people out there that I wouldn't necessarily share, as a way to help them or show them that there's someone else out there experiencing similar things they are.

    Sounds like you've got a great man! :)

  • Bri - Habbala Says:
    March 3rd, 2011 at 9:46 am

    So interesting! I haven't written anything I haven't talked to him about first, but I'm sure that will come. Writing is how I process things!

  • Bri - Habbala Says:
    March 3rd, 2011 at 9:48 am

    I DO!!! That's kind of the result I came too, that he is either going to like me– which includes all the craziness of the internet, or he won't. He appears to like it so far :)

  • Sam Says:
    March 3rd, 2011 at 10:17 am

    It's so interesting when online and offline worlds collide! My fiance is not very into social media, but he's grown to understand it and how important it is to me. The first time that he met one of my "online friends" was definitely a little weird for him, but now it's a piece of cake. Same things with my friends. For the longest time, they had no idea that I had this other life. They found out how many people follow me on Twitter and read my blog, and they were kind of shocked. The bottom line is, if something is important to you, those who care about you will recognize and embrace it, even if they don't entirely understand. Love reading your happy relationship posts!

  • Nora Says:
    March 3rd, 2011 at 10:53 am

    I won't ever forget how a month into dating Knight he asked to see my blog, learn more about it. So we spent an hour on the bed, curled up, him looking over my shoulder as I showed him my blog, my favorite blogs (you were on that list), how I post, what it's like, what Twitter looks like and etc. He reads from time to time, especially if I send him a link. He's totally on -board with being written about, loves when I post pictures and so wants to go on a blogger meet-up with me. He's all for it and that's awesome cause others haven't been so all about it. I think it's adorable. I love that Mr A is super cool with it and doesn't mind being photographed or written about, well, cause I love reading about him :)

  • Bri - Habbala Says:
    March 3rd, 2011 at 10:59 am

    Lucky for YOU, you're on the short list for spy photo text messages :)

  • erinmakesitwork Says:
    March 3rd, 2011 at 1:57 pm

    I love that Mr. A is so cool about everything. My life is lived online as well, and my wife has to be okay with that. Luckily she is. She doesn't totally understand it, but I am okay with that too.

  • Juliana Says:
    March 4th, 2011 at 9:29 am

    That's kind of where hubs and I are… he doesn't completely "get it" but he loves that I do it. And I always ask permission before sticking a photo of him somewhere. :)

  • Cait Says:
    March 6th, 2011 at 4:02 pm

    This *just* happened to me last week. My relationship is now two months old so I decided I should probably reveal my blog, especially since I suspected he already knew about it (but didn't think he was actively reading it). Turns out he'd known about it pretty much all along, even back from when we were just "talking" and not officially dating. This was embarrassing because one, I wasn't 100% sure about him when we first started talking (and said so on my blog) and two, all this time he knew about it and I never once mentioned it to him. In fact, the first thing he said when I told him was something like, "why didn't you tell me earlier?" I wanted to die.

    Luckily he seemed to be fine with it. I don't think he fully understands the whole community/friends part of it, but I was relieved that he wasn't offended that I'd talked about him/us. So glad Mr. A has a good attitude about the whole thing, too – it can be so tricky to explain and introduce the blogosphere to people who aren't a part of it.

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