Quitting a person I love on the Internet is harder than it should be. As a blogger, a large portion of my identity is carefully distilled and curated to reach an Internet audience – my tweets, my Facebook, my Tumblr all show people a bit of who I am. This isn’t always true for others, but I feel edified to read what someone writes on their blog, because I feel – probably falsely – that they might be sharing something intimate, essential to who they are.
What’s more, when I meet people who are quiet and/or good listeners, they are imbued with a new sense of depth. This person is wise! This person has secret knowledge that people like me, who talk effusively (even excessively when they’re nervous), will never be able to know! There’s more mystery. Mystery is something I’ve never achieved – I’m pretty much a WYSIWYG kind of girl.
So when I met Y, a lot of the mystery was solved when I read his blog. All the things he didn’t say (and probably more) were easily accessible – and searchable by date and keyword. He wasn’t a blogger like I’m a blogger; he’d have died before posting, for instance, “How to Look Busy at Work (And Dodge Responsibility!)”, or “8 Things You Never Knew You Needed to Kill Zombies.” His blog was actually a journal. He wrote about his drunk mishaps and his existential crises, his one-night stands and his grown-up woes. His self-proclaimed idol was Hunter S. Thompson; he loved to write. None of his blog was private (in fact, it was clearly linked on his Facebook); he respected his cohorts’ privacy by calling them by their initials. I was completely honest about reading his (totally public) blog (a favor he didn’t return when he read a private journal of mine later on).
We were friends; then we weren’t. We were friends again; he sent me some drunk emails; we dated. He was happy; I was happy; and then he was miserable, and to this day I can’t tell you why.
When we broke it off, he left it open-ended. “I need to move out,” he said, his eyes not meeting mine. I agreed to it, and then felt utterly foolish when I realized he’d broken it off without actually telling me what was what. On his last night living in our shared apartment, he didn’t come home, and he never told me where he’d been.
I kept his blog in my RSS reader, more out of carelessness than curiosity – it had been so long since he posted, I’d forgotten about it – and for awhile, it looked like we could be friends. I’d started dating someone, so it wasn’t shocking or hurtful to read that he’d moved on. What was, though, was reading what he wrote about how it ended. He said a lot of things about me: none of them were true. Implications included my never being happy [false]; and my being happy with how things were rather than striving for better [also false, and contradictory of his prior complaint] – both issues that he never brought up with me when we were dating. How’s that for mystery?
Disgusted, I unsubscribed. We had a brief, frustrating conversation via email, and several months later when he emailed me, I clicked “ignore all future mail”.
It was well over a year before I went back to his blog, but oh yeah . . . I went back, just like a bad child returning from the yard after picking out a switch for a forthcoming spanking. I reread everything – all the crazy stories that attracted me to him and all the lies that hurt me. Every bit. And then the mystery that was Y was gone.
His lies weren’t lies at all. He wasn’t malicious; he didn’t even have very many readers who knew who he was offline, so there’s no way he was trying to save face by looking like the good guy. He did what every good Hunter Thompson-wannabe does: he wrote what he thought he knew.
He saw complacency where I was actually working my ass off to save money and take some classes. He saw misery where I was really just too focused on working 70-hour weeks and writing to fuck around. He saw an attitude problem that was solely mine, without being able to admit that when he stopped trying, it made the relationship suck.
It shouldn’t have taken me this long to see it, but he never really knew me at all. I was the mystery he didn’t care enough to solve, and instead of being inscrutable, he was just wrong.
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2 comments
Erica Lee says:
Jul 20, 2010
Hey there lady friend,
I’m really sad/sorry your went through this. It sucks to find out that people are totally perceiving you the wrong way. But it’s true: People can only form opinions based on what they know, what they’ve experienced, etc. Maybe said ex had had gfs (or friends) in the past who he felt like “weren’t living up to their potential.” The way I see it, though, is that HE was the unhappy one–and maybe he was jealous that you seemed so “content with the way things are” (’cause let’s be honest–isn’t that usually a GOOD thing?).
I think the Internet totally makes getting over someone (or simply disconnecting from them) that much harder. I actually read about a program they have now called BlockYourEx (blockyourex.com). Ha. Wish that would’ve been invented years ago :)
xoxo
Connie Kenkel says:
Jul 22, 2010
I am glad you have closure. I refused to talk to an old ex when he called to explain his assanine (can’t spell it) behavior in ’76. To this day I wish I had not hung up the phone and at least listened to whatever lame excuse he had. There was not closure and probably never will be. I have since tried to find him and get that closure but alas too many years have gone by, and who knows where he is. Knowing someone didn’t bother to know you is very hard, but I have to say wondering what happened and why is horrid. Last of all, it was his loss not to choose to know my adopted daughter…