In the Medium post My Date Ghosted Me After Reading My Blog, author Yana Bostongirl reveals her dating difficulties as a sex & relationship writer.
She writes:
I am by no means perfect, but I do pride myself on being honest and straightforward but still naive as they come. Here, I thought I would finally date someone who appreciated me as a blogger but yea, that is yet to happen.
I found Yana’s post intriguing because she first says she writes under a pen name for privacy reasons. Then she says she told her date about her writing, and he didn’t show much interest. It was at that point she sent him the link to her profile.
I am not sure what shook him more — my anatomies of relationships past or the candor with which I share my stories.
I suspect it was neither. The act of publicly peeling our proverbial layers isn’t for the faint of heart. People who prefer to lead private lives are within their right to pass on someone whose job is to talk about their personal lives and those in it.
If I had to guess, it wasn’t just what Yana wrote that spooked her date. It was also her apparent desire for him to read it. Gently suggesting someone read about your previous suitors is no different than talking about your Ex on a first date. It’s a level of transparency the average person neither needs nor wants.
Before I go any further, I’ll say I started my career in the dating niche by writing about my dates and hookups. Was it fun to be provocative? Sure. Did it get me a lot of attention? Absolutely. Do you know what result it didn’t provide?
A relationship.
Several culminating factors contributed to this outcome. For the sake of this post, let’s focus on my writing.
Exhibitionist: a person who behaves extravagantly to attract attention.
It might feel naughty to share intimate exploits. Women aren’t supposed to talk publicly about such things. Bucking conventions can be exhilarating. The more salacious your secrets, the more chance you have of your content being shared with a broader audience. Comments pour in, telling you how arousing your words are. All one has to do is look at the comments on any Erotica post on Medium to see men drool over the author’s words or profile photo. (Fun fact: Many of those posts are written by dudes who have created women’s online personas. There’s a whole industry for that.)
It’s alarmingly easy to become dependent on the attention that form of writing can attract. The dopamine surges produced make you crave the attention that much more. Like any drug, you eventually develop a tolerance and must increase the dosage to get high. For a professional provocateur, that means upping the ante. The tales have to get more salacious. We feed that need at the expense of our relationships and self-esteem. Pretty soon, those lines are blurred. Our writing becomes a part of our on-and-off-line identity. Thanks to the echo chamber we’ve created of people egging us on and telling us how funny/brave/sexy we are, we develop a blind spot. Boundaries no longer exist.
That’s the problem for us and certainly for our prospective partners.
Narcissist: a person who has an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves.
Every single personal memoir writer has one of two defining moments.
Scenario #1:
You’re engaged in witty banter. Things are clicking. Then they drop the bomb.
“So…I Googled you.”
At first, it’s flattering. They liked you enough to do their research. They were intrigued. Your stomach pitches as they recite passages from your posts — usually the more provocative stuff. Your cheeks flush. It’s not fun anymore. You sit there listening, a strained smile plastered on your face, wondering if this was why they wanted to meet you. You go from feeling like a regal lioness to a trapped gazelle in seconds.
You write a post about the experience, expecting people to understand your discomfort. Instead, you hear things like, “You write about your sex life. What did you expect?”
Shame washes over you for thinking he could have liked you.
Scenario #2
You come home from a first date elated. They sent a text ensuring you got home safely. They asked for a second date. You think you found someone who gets you. You feel hopeful.
You write about it.
A day goes by. Maybe two. You don’t hear from them. You message them to say hello. They respond with those four words again.
“So…I Googled you.”
Only this time, the line is followed by, “This isn’t for me. I don’t like being written about. Can you delete that post?”
You return to your blog and vent about getting dumped. Your readers tell you to forget about him. That he’s insecure and threatened by women who are open about their sexuality and vulnerabilities, you believe them and keep believing the mythical Right Guy won’t have a problem with you baring your soul on the internet. Even though it’s a counter-intuitive decision, you don’t course correct. You continue down that path, dodging emotional grenades.
In my experience, the only men who liked being the focal point of one of my posts were narcissists. They thrived off the attention as long as it was positive. When things went sour and you said anything critical, they took issue with being discussed on a public forum. Suddenly, you were “obsessed” with them. They’d closely monitor your social media to ensure you weren’t giving them bad reviews.
The ones who backed away at the premise of being picked apart by online strangers were concerned by my lack of boundaries. Sure, it’s all puppy dogs and rainbows when things are going well. What would happen when we disagreed? Would I share pillow talk or anything else that transpired in the bedroom?
These were valid concerns. I overlooked them, telling myself they were intimidated by my insights and rawness.
The Masochist is a person who enjoys an activity that appears painful or tedious.
A line from the song “Everything You Want” by Vertical Horizon has always stuck with me.
You never could get it/Unless you were fed it.
For almost a decade, I wrote about my personal life. In that time, I’d taken my share of hits romantically.
“So why did you keep doing it?” you ask.
That’s a great question. The answer was self-sabotage. There was probably some self-loathing mixed in as well. I subconsciously put up an unscaleable wall around myself by making my personal life public and creating an entire brand around being single. While I may have believed I was emotionally available, I wasn’t. My words said one thing. My actions said another. I wrestled with this incongruity for a few more years until — finally — I’d been fed it. I wanted to close out my career as a dating writer in a healthy relationship so people could see I wasn’t the train wreck they (and I) thought I was. I held out as long as I could. After suffering multiple personal losses and enduring the abusive treatment of one egotistical man obsessed with reading about himself, I couldn’t take any more trauma. It was time to address what was going on beneath the surface.
In May 2018, I went into my blog’s admin panel and deleted everything. Everything. A few months later, I began my trauma recovery and coaching certification. One section of the course involved the study of attachment styles. My avoidant tendencies and fears of abandonment were the anchors weighing me down. Now I had a clear starting point for my path to healing.
A year later, I began dating again. The day after Christmas, I matched with a handsome Irishman. We went on our first date just before New Year’s Eve. I’d told myself I wasn’t feeling any chemistry and ended things after two dates. Several days passed. There wasn’t one where I didn’t question my decision. It wasn’t that I didn’t find him attractive or enjoy his company. I was scared at how available he was. I was used to latching on to unavailable men because I was unavailable. I asked him to meet me so we could talk. That was Valentine’s Day, 2019. Over drinks, I told him why I’d bailed and wanted to try again. Four years later, we’re still together.
We hear woo-woo things about how our thoughts become our reality. That’s true. Another area I studied while pursuing my certification was neuroplasticity. If we tell ourselves something consistently enough, we develop a neural pathway in our brain. Soon that negative belief becomes our default. If you’re writing posts or filming Tik Toks and Reels wherein you bemoan the state of dating, how bad your last date was, and the awful people you meet on dating apps, that will become your experience. Whenever you think about dating, your brain will say, “Uh, uh. It sucks. Don’t do it. It’s a waste of your time.” You will train your brain to see and subconsciously be drawn to people who aren’t right for you.
I’m grateful the decision to change course was mine and not a result of an ultimatum or duress. We arrive at certain crossroads in our own time. Some single dating-niche creators don’t experience this struggle. They find partners supportive of their choice to be so candid. My opinion is they’re the minority. Especially if the writer is a woman who dates men. We’re not allowed to be complex and layered. Society needs to put us in a box and pigeonhole us, so we’re less threatening. In the premiere season of And Just Like That, someone referred to Carrie as a sex columnist even though, by that point, she’d given up her column over a decade earlier and published several best-selling novels.
When the content you create affects your well-being and relationships, it might be time to reflect. Is putting yourself out there in this capacity worth the scrutiny? Each creator needs to decide that for themselves. Since I’m in the business of giving advice, I’ll close with this:
Rather than seeing self-editing as compromising your artistic integrity, see it for what it is: An act of self-care and preservation.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: Cayley Nossiter on Unsplash