I have a secret to tell you: I’ve been dating a guy for the last week. It’s gotten somewhat serious. We’ve gone on multiple dates and even had a lite version of the Kids and Marriage Conversation. Why haven’t I written or Tweeted about it? Because I like him and didn’t want to ruin it. Recently, on my Formspring account (go ask me questions!) I was asked: How would you react to dating or talking or hooking up with a guy who didn’t want you to blog/speak about him?

When I tell friends about my blog, this is the question I’m most frequently asked. I’m sure my fellow dating and relationship bloggers are also asked this. In matters of truth and love, we want others to know us as we are, which can sometimes lead to awkward disclosures (Simone, I feel your pain). Here is my response: The guy wouldn’t know about my blog (unless HE was a blogger, *ahem*) so there’d be no need to tell him. In any case, I try to write as if I was talking about him … to his face. Funny related story: One of my “coffee shop boyfriends” was talking to me the other day about poetry (I try my hand at it sometimes) and asked me what I wrote about. I told him I wrote about details in life (snow falling, the taste of passion fruit, the smell of a stable) but that my MOST popular poems were about relationships and specifically, heartbreak (there’s a similar pattern in my blog traffic, but I digress). He responded, “Oh really?” in the most incredulous tone, “You write poems about your relationships?” At that point, I laughed and said to myself, “If only you knew.”

As bloggers, we are faced with this unique dilemma: Do we tell the truth about our secret blogging identities? If so, when and how? This is still a question I do not have an answer to (I have yet to tell the Mystery Man I’ve been dating for the last week about this blog, yet I’ve told a couple of random people I’ve met in coffeeshops), but an even more interesting question to me is this: Why do I blog about some in my life, and not others? Why did I tell you that I was “bored” with Ansel, or that Payam is a virgin, or that Francois was too afraid to fall in love? Because, at some basic level, I knew that blogging about these men was leaving them open to the criticism of the masses (i.e., you, the audience). And leaving them open to criticism assumes a certain realization that these men are no longer as important to me as they might have been. Yes, I was asking for advice from you when I blogged about Francois’ infamous statement “I don’t think I’ll fall in love with you.” But wasn’t I also letting Francois go by blogging about our private conversations?

By blogging about my private problems and broadcasting them to the Internet, wasn’t this a way of admitting to myself and you that the relationship between Francois and I would inevitably end? So when I don’t want to write about a relationship, as I haven’t wanted to do this last week, I can’t help but wonder: Am I protecting the sweet moments between two people who find each other in this mad world? Why would I want to diffuse that magic by releasing it into the hands of commenters who have not experienced the same magic, who do not know me or him or the context within which the first flickerings of love appear? The kicker, of course, is that now I want to blog about Mystery Man. Conversations came up which have brought me to question a future with him. And now I feel like writing. The magic is disappearing, the end is nigh and I am ready for your comments.