July is relationship month at Flink

Luckily, July is almost over ;)

I just finished reading this very in-depth article about the break-up of CitizenAgency's two founders Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, So Open it Hurts.

At first it surprised me that San Francisco Mag would devote 15 pages of copy to the couples rather messy and public demise, but as I read the article I began to appreciate the impetus to understand such a public affection/disaffection.

Essentially Chris and Tara are all of us, but they are the extremes. The two open source promoters who actually got out there and ran the revival style OS meetings ( called BarCamps, I went to one in Toronto and the two luminaries showed up wayyyyyy hung over about 3 hours into the day) and lived as if the principals of Open Source design could inspire the healthy function of everything, including their relationship. Since I think tara was the key architect of the emotional openness aspect of the relationship, and since she to be honest, is the one left holding the short end of the ethernet cable at the end of the relationship, she gets the most coverage in the article.

As I (and Tara by now) already know, it's great to link love with someone who loves you back', but, as Tara learned the hard way, it is incredibly embarrassing to post poems about your ex.

We are all learning to negotiate for better of for worse the fact that real intimacy happens in both places, onscreen and in the flesh, and the price of real intimacy is a different in the different domains. Showing a sad poem to 5 dear friends and having them help you laugh it off after a careful and wine-soaked critique, is a way better option then showing it to the world. But maybe just maybe, you need the world to see you embrace the shame and pain of losing someone you loved? What better way than a crappy poem, like the good doctor says, sometimes you gotta take the bandage off so a scab can form and the wound can heal.

I understand the desire to write posts tagged as 'personal' as a desire to be intimate with my random set of readers, sometimes. Other times when I write there is this undercurrent wherein I think about a few people or one person in particular who will read what I wrote and I wonder "what will XXX think of this."

So in that sense, break-up blogging, break- up twittering, break-up whatever you are doing online to get you through (like what I am doing now, kinda I guess if you can call what I just went through a relationship - which you can't) is a way to still be talking to the person, of course it is, denying that is denying the weird fractal nature of writing in public. Sure I am writing for everyone, but some of the sentences in here will be crystalline for some people.

In the pre-web break-up days we all had hours of marching around our home towns saying to ourselves: "Well if I run into that little so and so I am just going to give him/her a piece of my mind." Except you don't, you run into the little so-and-so and you say, "Hey... uh.. you look good too.. no, I am doing well, yeah, totally. Okay cool see you bye." Then you walk home crafting the perfect devastating witty response.

So the blog is where these things go, our imaginary and real coping strategies. But also sometimes by the time you get home you don't have the bravado you had the whole walk there. You just sit down in front of the 'puter and your remember what their eyes looked like back when they were in love with you - and the computer rather then your BFF or your little brother becomes the still pool for all your tears.

Is it a good idea? Who knows. Is it here to stay? In the words of a friend, Fuck yeah.

And yes, we have Tara and her rotten, mean old ex-boyfriend to thank for the multiple ways we can express sorrow, regret and (on the good days) elation about love on the web. So for all that her break-up sucked, she should be very proud of herself for all the work (emotional, and old fashioned nose to grindstone) she's done.