What happens when you fall for someone who airs every detail of her life on the Internet? As Joshua David Stein found out, romance can never win in a sphere where nothing is private.
At 25, I felt like a full member of the blogging revolution. I’d awaken in the morning pawing for my Macbook Pro. “This is my laptop,” I’d say, clutching it to my chest. “There are many like it, but this one is mine.” I spent my days recording pithy and snarky insights for a popular Manhattan media blog called Gawker and my nights at parties, collecting impressions of hipsters and editors like rare butterflies.
When I first met Emily, another editor at Gawker, I felt an instant kinship. We were part of a “creative underclass,” according to a magazine article about the site: bitter, frothing bloggers raging against the world, broadcasting our grievances to the similarly jaded masses for the glory of a transient byline and a couple thousand page views.
On my first day on the job, back in March 2007, Emily bought me a raspberry clafoutis from Balthazar. Soon we were flirting. The little yellow AOL Instant Messenger man became our cupid, ferrying suggestive exchanges. Though we worked a few feet away from each other in our Soho office, most of what I knew of her I had read on her blog posts. She loved Stevie Nicks. She lived in Greenpoint with her boyfriend of six years. She had tattoos and liked yoga. She’s wickedly funny, or vice versa. Most of what Emily knew about me, she had likewise picked up from my blog posts. I did yoga as well. I had tattoos, too. I had just gotten out of a three-year relationship with a magazine editor. Emily, or the Emily I had conjured up from her posts, was brash, bluff and “as I could see, sitting next to her — startlingly attractive. “What could be the harm in flirting?” I wondered, after receiving a particularly piquant IM about how much she liked putting things into her mouth.
Then, last summer, four of the site’s five editors went off on a staff retreat to Fire Island. (Alex, the fifth, was very careful — and perhaps very wise — to construct a firewall between his personal and professional lives.) Emily was, for the first time, a person who blogged and not a blogger. On the Long Island Rail Road train back home, after a weekend of stifled sexual tension, I kissed her. We were suntanned and it was Sunday. We sank into the Naugahyde of the train seat, trying to escape the eyes of the other passengers. Those 20 minutes between Jamaica and Penn Station were thrilling, sexy and illicit. On the third of July, I read on the blog, like some 16,920 other readers, that Emily and her boyfriend had broken up.
And so we started to see each other. I desperately wanted to keep our relationship secret from our co-workers and from others in the media world. Emily, after all, had honed her knife skills eviscerating the private lives of public figures. I was no slouch in rather cruel commentary, either. We both had enemies to whom news of our affair would be like a warm cream pie waiting on the windowsill to be thrown in our face.
The thing is, I still felt there was a clear divide between the work me and the real me. For Emily, the work her was her. She didn’t change into civilian clothing, like I did, after the day was done. When Emily stopped blogging for Gawker each day, she went home to another, personal blog. But since it was about books, not boys, and since I had expressly asked that our love be one that dare not speak our names, I thought I was safe. I wasn’t.
There were omens, of course. One day not long after we had started dating, she let drop that she had told our boss about our relationship. Soon I found out she had told almost everyone we worked with. I was torn. I understood the warrior’s code of the blogosphere: The conviction that the details of one’s inner life are of interest to the larger world legitimized what both Emily and I spent our days doing. On the other hand, I was furious and more than a little scared that she would so unhesitatingly run roughshod over my desire for privacy.
Then, one night in late July, over a dinner of sweet cherry salad in the garden of the Queen’s Hideaway in Greenpoint, I told Emily I didn’t want a serious relationship. I wasn’t sure if our frenzy of intimacy was merely a response to our recent breakups, and I didn’t want to be her rebound or have her be mine. The thought of jumping back into the morass of emotions, especially with a co-worker, left me cold. And, yes, the fact that we had made a career of throwing stones at glass houses and then constructed a love shack for ourselves was a bit too unsettling. She took our breaking up — or more accurately, “scaling down” — well.
But later that night, she IM’d me that she had started a secret blog. About us. Even from the name, Heartbreaksoup.wordpress.com, I knew this wasn’t a good thing. The blog was a dystopic version of Amanda Hesser’s book Cooking for Mr. Latte, combining recipes with sordid details of our relationship. Sure, Emily took some tentative stabs at anonymity, using initials and pseudonyms, but the words were all real. The first post, in late July, detailed our conversation at the Queen’s Hideaway: [W]hatever he said was something along the lines of: We’ve both recently gotten out of big things and we both obviously genuinely want to be our own people, to be grown-ups in the world alone. I DO ACTUALLY WANT THIS. But? I want him to want more? Why wouldn’t I? … But here’s why I will maybe almost certainly get hurt. I’m fa … mph. Takes so much effort to say this, even anonymously. I’m falling in love with him.
I was surprised by the intensity of her message but also by the medium by which she delivered it. To me, some things were best left unblogged, but to Emily, a true believer, blogging was as natural and necessary as breathing. She couldn’t tell me she loved me with only air between us, so she left me a note on the Web and let me know where to find it.
Skimming the thousands of words, I am still by turns flattered and enraged. Mostly though, I’m creeped out. With surgical precision, Emily described the fissures in her emotional defenses. She claims I was the next big thing in her life. Reading that she loved me, I felt a cruel phony. I certainly didn’t love her. I liked her and — though I’m ashamed to admit it — mostly liked the idea of liking her. But by rolling over and showing me her vulnerable underbelly, Emily was putting herself at my mercy. “Here’s how to hurt me,” she seemed to say, “now you wouldn’t dare.”
For a short while, I didn’t dare. I hung in there, lashed to the bow by pity and, shamefully, cowardice. If this is what she’s writing when we’re still together, imagine what she’ll write when we break up, I thought. And still, as I read, “Walking up on sun-dappled Joralemon Street this morning after a long swim in the floating pool, I was hit by a cold breeze and then a pang of nostalgia so sharp it took my breath away,” my panicky claustrophobia grew stronger.
Unsurprisingly, the relationship began to crumble. And as Emily and I began to topple, her blog became an emotional back channel of communication between us, for all she wanted me to know but couldn’t say. Not only did she love me, but I found out that she reads my e-mail (“What, it’s MY fault people leave their gmail open?”), hates my ex-girlfriend’s magazine (“fuhhcking trust fund retaaarded”) and doesn’t think that I “should be let loose in the world, working through [my] issues on unsuspecting, vulnerable easy targets.” Clearly Emily knew I read these posts (she sent me the URL many times over), but it seemed like a faux pas to actually discuss anything she had written. Unlike a conversation, the blog was her sacred and proprietary space. The problem was it was all about me and my shortcomings as a lover and a beloved. Reading her posts felt like getting kissed, then slapped, then kissed, and finally skeeved out as the world watched. One entry concerning me reads in part, “I think he’s funny and talented. He might be evil, but he’s interesting, you know? And how many people can you say that about? The other boys I’ve been killing time with lately, while they’ve got a ton of compensatory charms, don’t ring that bell. There’s nothing about them that makes me want to investigate, to get to the bottom of it.”
When we finally broke up in late August, I did it over IM, just like we had started the relationship. Though I somewhat expected it, I was surprised by the haste with which Emily had cut, pasted and posted our conversation to nearly all of our co-workers. Our split had of course, made its way onto Heartbreaksoup, too. One night, I was out to dinner with a work acquaintance, an editor at a rival blog. “I’ve been thinking about going to the Queen’s Hideaway,” she said. “You just went there with Emily, right?” I asked her how she knew. “Oh,” she said, “don’t you know, she has a blog about you guys?”
Soon colleagues and it felt like everyone in the gossipy media world were asking questions about me and my Mommy issues. A Vanity Fair fact-checker and friend asked whether it was true that I had a Serge Gainsbourg tattoo on my back (yes). An editor at ESPN wanted to know whether I really had told Emily that I wanted a girl in every port (maybe). Was I really as evil as she made me out to be, pondered a publishing-house worker. (Depends who you ask). A girl I ran into on the L train told me her ex-boyfriend had gone to Hebrew school in Bethesda with Emily 15 years ago and had recently received an e-mail from her. “I know we haven’t spoken in years but I started a blog about my sexual exploits. You should read it.”
By October, I had to confront her about her zeal in airing her antipathy toward me. We stood outside our office, just out of earshot of our co-workers. She was surprised I was upset. “It’s your job, Josh, it’s what you signed up for,” she said. “Don’t you know the private is public?” I hadn’t and I don’t.
To her, all that was mine was hers to have, to hold, to blog. I had been a naïve pretender to the party. Blogging is what I did to pay the bills. Not who I was. “I thought my privacy was mine. Not yours,” I said somewhat feebly. She shrugged and, shooting me a lopsided smile, said, “You should have known better. After all, I’m a blogger.”