In the age of the internet, it’s normal for our private lives to play out in public. In just a few clicks, you can peek into a beauty influencer’s medicine cabinet, peruse a sex toy blogger’s prized collection (hi), or visit voyeur house private cams where you can watch the life of real people. Not everyone is thrilled about all this openness and exhibitionism, but it’s undeniably part of our culture now.
So, as a sex writer and certifiable member of the Oversharers Club, it surprised me how private I was about my current relationship in its infancy. I talked about it in oblique terms on Twitter, and mentioned to a few friends that I’d been texting with a promising new dude who lived in New York, but for the most part, I wanted to hold those cards close to my chest. Our courtship happened primarily late at night via FaceTime and iMessage, encrypted end-to-end, cordoned off from the rest of our lives. It felt weird to bring it out into the open by talking about it too much – like someone throwing open the door of a darkened closet during a heated game of Seven Minutes in Heaven.
But because this private intimacy was shared between only me and my new crush, it felt almost like it didn’t really exist – like it could be a mirage, a hallucination, a midnight fever-dream. It brought me back to my early days on the internet, when I’d build elaborate romances with strangers in IRC chats and then just go to school the next day like nothing had happened, like nothing had changed. Even as we escalated to using weightier words for each other – partner, boyfriend and girlfriend – still, part of me felt like: here is my “real life,” and here is this relationship, and scarcely the twain shall meet.
So it was quite a jolt the first time my new love – Matt – came to visit me in Toronto. Seeing him in familiar locales, like my bedroom, my parents’ living room, and the coffee shop I go to every week, was as jarring as a bad green-screen sequence in a low-budget movie. How could such a cute, sweet person, who had taken on an almost mythical quality in my mind, exist in the world at all, let alone in my life? I felt like Rob Gordon, the antihero of High Fidelity, when he looks up his long-lost college girlfriend: “She’s in the fucking phone book! She should be living on Neptune. She’s an extraterrestrial, a ghost, a myth, not a person in a phone book!”
He met my family. He met my friends. I took him to my birthday party. But none of it quite felt real – until, shortly after leaving the party, I got a text from my friend Suz, who had left at the same time as us. “Okay, so, creepiest thing I have ever done,” she wrote, “but when we departed at the subway, I could see y’all from the other side. You both looked so in love, so I took some creepy stealth pics for you.”
Matt and I giggled over the photos, crowing “We’re so cute!” and zooming in to examine our amorous body language. Something clicked. Seeing my relationship from the outside allowed me to believe in it from the inside. I felt validated: Yes, he really exists; yes, he really is that cute; yes, he really loves me! Some part of me had been continually nervous that he would evaporate somehow, that I would wake up from the dream or forget to save my game, and he would be gone. But there he was, in a handful of .jpegs, flirting with me on a Toronto subway platform, irrefutable.
Feeling observed in a feeling can make that feeling all the more palpable. Maggie Nelson writes about it in Bluets: “We sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.” Beauty vloggers know this, as do reality TV stars, theatre actors, Instagram influencers, exhibitionists and voyeurs. Like Schrodinger’s cat, sometimes it is the very act of seeing that heralds the seen object into existence. My relationship would have been real with or without spectators, of course – but my rock-solid, comfortable, life-affirming belief in that relationship? Maybe not so much.
This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own. Thank you to Suz for the photos; we love them!