It was the summer of 2009 – I had just had my heart broken, started graduate school in a heavy hitting field that I had never taken a single related class in college, and was experiencing a full-on quarter-life existential crisis, that no one but my parents fully knew the depths of because it seemed like there were no words in the English language that could adequately express it, and even if there were I wasn’t ready to talk about it after my failed attempts at communication two years prior.
Dating blogs are usually short-lived, because of two reasons 1) the propensity to share one’s dating life with complete strangers wears off after you either find ‘the one’ or you never find the one and then you are just writing about all your failed dates and past experiences, which while at first is cathartic, gets depressing and you start to sound like a broken record 2) it’s a bit like Schrodinger’s cat. I remember one woman’s blog loverville, and she always gave each of her dates a nickname (SO sex and the city right?) like Captain Awesome and Austin Powers. After reading her blog for over a year, I couldn’t help but wonder if she might have more success with relationships if she didn’t immediately give the men she dated a nickname and write about them online. I believe (and I have no proof) that something about the act of writing about dating, changes the act of dating
This is the beauty of the internet. In it’s best form it stretches us, and allows us to truly connect to each other from the veil of anonymity. For me, it allowed me to binge read dating blogs with names like F*cking in Brooklyn – Love as a life or death experience, and see myself, incarnate in the bodies and minds of other writers. That was the first time I realized how powerful blogs could be, and how I got hooked on them – albeit I do not read dating blogs anymore. Later in my life I would graduate to more ‘grown-up’ blogs like statistics and data science, finance and economic, etc, but I will never forget my first foray into dating blogs, and this post from Jackie, because it made me realize that everything I was going through that everyone around me seemed unable to relate to, had happened before, was real and valid and was merely a small wisp of thread within the fabric of our collective human experience.
What was the first blog that you ever binge read, and what do you remember most about it? Let me know below in the comments.
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