Okay, getting back on track here. I previously wrote around a question Jen posed, failing to answer it at all. Her question was:
Do you generally tell people you meet in-person that you maintain this
blog? If so, when & how? .... If a person you are getting to know
through some other route of
interaction/communication finds and reads this blog do you find that it
helps or hinders the building a relationship?
In general, I don't tell people I meet in-person about the weblog. It seems like a strange thing to tell someone. I don't assume it's a secret -- again and again people tell me about stumbling across my blog while Googling something else. So I don't feel like I'm hiding it by not disclosing it. It's more that the act of disclosing it seems to grant it more importance than it has. "Hi, how are you? Great to meet you. Listen, you should know something about me. I have a weblog. Here's the url. Do you have a pen? Yeah, okay, here's the address. That's my weblog. Great. So, have you lived in town long?" Telling people about it seems to place a burden on them -- like I expect them to care, like I expect them to read it. And I really don't have that expectation. It seems presumptuous to assume that it would be relevant to our interaction.
The alternative that I choose, not mentioning it, makes me wonder sometimes if people think it's illicit, like they think they shouldn't know or they shouldn't read it. A couple of friends and people in my wider circle of acquaintances have confessed that they feel like voyeurs, that they need me to know about the asymmetry of our relationship, that they read regularly. It's not illicit. If you read this blog and I don't know about it, that's okay. You can tell me or not. I'm not writing things here that I don't feel safe having people read. If you read something that you like or that makes you feel like you know me in a different way than we know each other in "real life" then it's cool if you tell me that -- I'll be flattered and pleased. I feel pleased every time someone chooses to take time out of their day to check in on my life -- it makes me feel like I have friendly well-wishers out there in the world, and that's a real treat. If I know you read the weblog, I'll try not to repeat stories to you in real life that I've already told on the blog. (That's kind of embarrassing.)
But the way we interact in person is what will govern how I feel about you, how close we are, and what path our relationship takes. You don't get "points" added or taken away for being a blog reader. Okay, maybe a few points added. It just means we save a little time getting to know one another, because you can do most of the talking to catch me up on you. Even those friends who read the blog pretty regularly, I don't assume they've read every post or always read it. People's reading habits vary. I don't expect anyone to be constantly interested in what I'm noticing or thinking about. It's cool -- very cool -- that some people are. But it's not a failure of loyalty or friendship if some people aren't.
The circumstances in which I stew about this most are in the fragile early stages of romantic relationships. I don't write too much about my love life but there's nonetheless plenty up here about my hopes and my disappointments, my wounds and my fumbles. The choice of whether to disclose or to hide that is a little bit loaded. But, come on. If you Google me, this is the first thing you find. So I wonder a lot, has this guy Googled me? Has he read the blog? What does he think about it?
I had this conversation with the Charming Gentleman the weekend that my dog died, as we were driving to Boston. So, um, I have this website, I said. And sometimes I take requests, and someone wrote in to ask me whether I tell people about it. So, you know, I thought I'd tell you about it. I have this place on the Internet where I write about my life. He asked me some questions -- how many readers, how often do I write? And then he admitted that he'd read it, although not since November or December, when we'd first become acquainted. I thought he had, from some hints he'd dropped before. And of course then I flurried with worry. How come he hadn't looked at it since November? What had I written in November? Ack.
Eventually, people who get to be good friends learn about it -- from other friends, from some story I tell about an email or a comment left by a blog reader, from me talking about what I figured out while writing a post. And it does feel like it's something about me that matters. I have a relationship with this weblog and with the people who read it that's real. It's really important to me, in my "real life," that I know so many people through this "blog life." But I don't assume it will matter all that much to the people I know in "real life."
