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The 21st Century Threesome: Me, You, and My Blog

posted 16th March 2010    Written by: Nicole Antoinette    CATEGORY: Love/Relationships, Nicole Antoinette, Season 2

It came up in bed one night, our first night actually, a night that I already liked him hard enough to not fall into sex when we were still too new as an us for it to be a good idea.

And so we talked, back and forth and all over each other until 5am, telling each other about who we are and where we’ve been and what we want from these big shiny adult lives that seem to have popped up out of nowhere.

He talked about music, I talked about food. We did big picture and small specifics and if he could have read my mind that night, he’d know that what I was really trying to do was figure out how he fit into the life I was putting everything on the line to build.

We jumped from topic to topic, mainlining each other’s details, until we finally settled into the conversation about writing. It came up naturally, on the heels of a string of thoughts about overwhelming passion, and I told him that I wanted to write more than I wanted air. He laughed in a way that said, “You’re dramatic but I get you,” and it made me blush in a way that said, “Stop but don’t.”

I told him that I write to understand myself, that I have to put it, everything, down in words and throw it out into the world before it can make sense to me.

We talked about our blogs, his much newer than mine, and I shared that living my life out loud is a sacrifice I made by accident and now couldn’t get out of if I tried. I told him it’s probably a good thing that I don’t want to try.

He fell asleep before me, arms wrapped around my body in that gentle octopus way that I always say I don’t like but secretly crave, and I thought about how gradually and unintentionally my blog really has infiltrated every single part of my life. There I was, in that bed, in that corner of town, with that breath against my ear and none of it would be happening if I didn’t write about my life on the internet.

I think about this a lot actually, about how the boundaries of offline me and online me have bled together to create a mashup version of who I am and I realize that in a lot of ways, I use my blog as a filter. The people I interact with on a daily basis are all people I’ve met through my blog, and while I like that by the time I meet them in person they have an accurate sense of what it’ll be like to have a relationship with me, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to be social without a virtual ice breaker, how to show someone who I am from the very beginning, without my blog as a crutch.

This is true with friends, but it’s even truer with dating.

Any guy who’s having a relationship with me is also having a similarly intense relationship with my blog; if he’s sleeping with me, he’s sleeping with the fact that almost everything I do winds up online, and if he’s not okay with that, it’s just not going to work.

And this is the challenging part, the delicate balancing act that’s true of all threesomes, the question of which thing I’m more attracted to, the guy or my blog, and whether it really is possible to have both at once without ruining either one.

photo credit: guldfisken

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