10 September 2003

Did You Really Need To Know?

It seems that one of the biggest trends of the modern computing era is the creation of online diaries. These diaries come in several flavors and are referred to by a variety of names. The people at Diary Land simply refer to theirs as diaries. Live Journal is another site that hosts online diaries, and they even make available the software to host your own should you happen to have access to a server which will allow you to run the necessary scripts. On Angelfire you can gain access to software to create your own Web Log, or Blog.

Regardless of what you call them, each and every one of these services is fundamentally an online diary, and a lot of people who take advantage of these treat them exactly like a paper diary and pour their innermost thoughts and feelings into their entries. On the one hand this can be a good thing, as it can be used as a tool to get inside someone’s head and see what makes them tick, thus promoting greater understanding between people.

On the other hand there are those who have no interest in learning what makes someone tick. Their sole purpose in paging through these diary entries is to look for fuel for their insult machines. However, I choose to believe that these people are in the minority, for if our society has degenerated to such a level that these people are in the majority then what reason do I have to get up and go to work every day?

On the Gripping Hand the old saying “Buyer beware!” is one that most certainly applies to the perusal of an online diary, for one always runs the risk of learning something that they may have been better off not knowing.

Yesterday this happened to a friend of mine.

I'm not going to name names, for there is every possibility of her reading this and it really isn't my place to go advertising her secrets. However, I am still going to tell the story because there is every possibility of all of us learning something from it.

For some time my friend has been romantically involved with a gentleman she works with. The two were attracted to each other almost from the moment they met and their entire courtship has had something of a whirlwind flavor. After a short time they decided to move in together.

Now, like any couple they fight and have their disagreements. Sometimes this can be perfectly healthy as it gives both parties a chance to get issues off their chests. It also creates the opportunity for makeup sex, which can be quite the experience in itself.

Anyway, my friend has been off work for the last week or so. She has been laid off temporarily until the training class is assigned for the new contract she has been posted to. So she's been puttering around the house and just generally enjoying life. She sat down at the computer yesterday and inadvertently ended up faced with her loved ones LiveJournal.

Now at this point she had a choice. She could choose to respect his privacy, even though he had really given up that right by posting his thoughts to the Internet, and move on to something else, or she could give in to her curiosity and read what he had to say. She decided to give in to her curiosity.

I can understand her point of view. Here is the diary of a man with whom she is deeply in love and who, to her knowledge, is just as deeply in love with her. Naturally she would expect to see page after page of the kind of romantic rambling in which all of us have indulged at one time or another.

How I wish that had been what she had found. It would have been a lot less painful for her.

What she found was page after page of criticisms, all about her, in which her significant other to be listed all the ways in which she comes up short. She's not pretty enough. She's not alternative enough. She doesn't have enough tattoos or piercings. In other words, he went to great pains to list in explicit language all the ways in which she didn't live up to his ideal image of his perfect woman.

I think you can all imagine the reaction. She's hurt and lonely and confused, doesn't know what to make of what she read. All she knows for sure is that their relationship is over and there isn't any way that she can think of to salvage it. She climbed into a bottle and proceeded to get herself rip roaring drunk, and when he came home from work she confronted him with what she had found. So there has been much argument and recrimination and generally a rotten time has been had by all.

Bottom line is they both fucked up.

He fucked up by placing those thoughts of his in a publicly accessible forum knowing full well that she could gain access to it anytime she wanted to, and he also fucked up by not talking to her about his misgivings in the first place. Yes, the discussion would have caused them pain, but when you're thinking things like what he was thinking, isn't it more of a mercy to let the other person know now before you take the kind of action that can only be undone through the involvement of lawyers?

And she fucked up by ignoring his right to privacy and by going into his personal thoughts without consulting him first.

Now it can be argued, and I made the point at the beginning of all this, that he pretty much gave up his right to privacy when he posted his diary on the Internet. However, it can also be argued that regardless of the medium in which he posted his musings, he still has the right to either conceal them from his significant other to be or to control the means in which he makes her aware of them. In order to make a long term relationship work a lot of compromises have to be made, and one of the biggest is that both sides of the relationship have a right to personal privacy which must be observed in order for the relationship to work.

What I don't understand is why people have this need to let the world peer into the dusty dirty corners of their minds, and why people involved in long term relationships believe that every single thing, every stray thought, every word, must be dissected and analyzed and understood, and must also be disclosed to the other person. And what I find interesting is that in a lot of relationships this kind of disclosure is really one sided. I demand to know everything that you think or feel, but you don't have to tell me a damn thing.

That's not what happened here, though. No, what happened here was even more insidious, even more dangerous. I know that you feel the same way about me that I feel about you and so I'm going to go rooting around in your personal space for proof of your feelings because I require validation. I need to know, to hear it from your own heart that you feelings match mine and the best place to get that and be certain of the sincerity is in your personal writings.

Why is it dangerous, you ask? Because it's presumptuous, that's why, and presumption always comes back and bites you in the ass. This case is a perfect example of it.

It was presumptuous of him to think that he could hide is feelings from her, and it was also an act of cowardice, for the longer he kept her in the dark the longer he could put off having to face his feelings. And it was presumptuous of her to think that his writings would pander to her need for personal validation just because she needs proof that their relationship works.

Well, now they're both paying the price for their presumption. I don't know what effect all this is going to have on their long term relationship, but I do know that things will never be the same between them. Now she's always going to wonder if he means the things that he says to her, and he's always going to wonder if he can trust her.

So tell me something: Did you really want to know?