Make the Blogger IRL: A Love Story
Elisa of Ophelia’s Webb recently wrote a really amazing post about how the brilliant bloggers of the world, are ruining her singleness
Granted, I am not single but I am in a relationship with one of those bloggers and this fulfilling blogging, online world is exactly how we met.
Babe, I’m totally blogging this
I wonder, in earnest, why do we not create or find more relationships (romantic) between blogger to blogger?
Elisa states:
The fact that the entire relationship (platonic and otherwise) is built on the mental and emotional connection of online interaction inevitably sets us up for feelings and fantasies that have no grounding in reality. In my most logical of mindsets, I completely understand that while there is a legitimate bond to these connections, often they are only possible amongst the circumstances of a Skype call or Twitter reply stream.
They’re not necessarily anyone that you particularly want to have a long-lasting co-habitating candlelit dinners on the beach for the rest of your life with. You know if you were to spend more than an hour or two with them, you would probably kill them. Or at least throat-punch them.
Yet you still wonder what it would be like to pack up and move across the country (or world) to date them. You follow their feeds a LITTLE too close, and know everything down to that unfortunate chicken kabob incident that happened three weeks ago. You manage to overlook their complete incompatibility because you only interact with them for small spurts of time during which people tend to be on their best behavior.
Echoing Elisa, from personal experience, I believe that we actually don’t know as much about our blogging friends UNTIL we take the online, offline.
I will preface and say that many of my closest friends are bloggers and it is how we originally connected, yet, we are very much IRL. Blogging is just the medium in which to meet people – after you’ve met the relationship develops like any other. Furthermore, 99% of my IRL meetings have been just as I imagined and I’m so grateful for my blogging peeps.
Many people undergo an online flirtation with their blogging “friends” but it often doesn’t go too far, because once we meet them we might realize, “Oh, wait, that’s not the guy/girl I thought I knew.” I’ve seen it in front of my own face, time after time where online it was butterflies, and when it came time to take it offline it either didn’t go there or when it did, it wasn’t as they thought.
Until you become IRL, you realize that is why it’s so elusive to see and hear these people, their brilliant ideas, their wonderfully written words and when they get ready to Skype with you their hair is done and you also, look good.
The man who intrigued my heart and mind is a writer, a blogger, and someone I have known from this wild online world web for almost three years.
However, we took it offline as he visited on a whim to see friends, family and well, me. For fun, since we were online friends.
That in person meeting was key. We had talked before, but until we met in person and experienced the ineffable chemistry (that’s the golden ticket, folks) we realized how this was different. Oh, the surprise in life.
Over the next few months following the first visit it was a flutter of texts, IM’s, phone calls late into the night and emails.
We wanted to share everything.
We were smitten and scared.
Overtime, you become jaded, you remember your past pain and feel uncertain of the risks of love. I remember crying to him, unsure I wanted to press forward because I was straight scared, not ready to feel again.
But, we did. We pressed forward. It turned into a decision we both made, him revealing his larger than life heart and moving across the country to be here, in Boulder so we could try us.
We’ve still got us, a year and a half later.
He would admit it too, we truly, never really knew each other until we began our relationship IRL here, in Boulder. There was a lot I learned about him that I couldn’t have seen before and of course, the inevitable challenges of being IRL and starting a serious relationship. Nothing to hide behind now, friends.
Unless you see them or make the long-distance, little-to-no-distance and face-to-face a relationship is difficult to sustain.
It might be a fallacy to see these incredibly driven, amazing people (they are, that is no doubt) but they still might be incredibly rude to a waiter when you actually go out on a date, they might not share big stories in their life that might make you question them, you don’t know how they act in big groups socially or their in-person quirks and needs.
We put our best foot forward when we have a computer or phone in front of us. It is easier to hide the darker, broken bits.
The list I wrote last week about how to really tell the character of someone are all things you must discover in person. Digital doesn’t cut it.
You have to see with your own eyes how they react, act, treat and communicate when shit gets real, in person, in groups, in social situations, when times get bad and they can’t put down the phone saying they have to go, they have to look you in the face and be honest. Be present.
I’m so glad I took the online to offline, and made the blogger IRL.
What do you think? Have you taken a blogger/online relationship offline romantically? Was it as you thought?
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