ExposedNYC

I absolutely admire non-anonymous bloggers. I knew before I ever got into this gig that in order to be completely honest, I would have to take a cue from the Wizard of Oz and hide behind some sort of virtual curtain. There were three major factors that influenced this decision- Guys, Girlfriends, and Grandparents.

When it comes to dating, no one is completely honest, and I don’t think we want to be. If you knew all of someone’s bad habits up front- how they obsessed over outfits, worried about what to say, danced around the room in their underwear and wet hair singing along to the radio at full blast to counteract all of the worrying- would we ever give them the chance for these traits to become endearing? One of my favorite quotes about relationships comes from Good Will Hunting, when Robin Williams tells a story about his wife farting in her sleep, but most men I know would run the other direction if faced with knowledge of nocturnal flatulence on a first date.

I would also never intentionally want to hurt anyone’s feelings. As much fun as dating disasters are to share with the world, I’m not in the business of humiliating another human being. Using nicknames and avoiding pictures lets us all learn and laugh from each other’s mistakes from the safety of our own homes.

Plus, if I haven’t yet made up my mind about someone, I don’t want their knowledge to turn into self-doubt or worse, taking cues from the things I write and telling me what they think I want to hear. I may never have been approached by someone I’m pretty excited about seeing again if he knew that I’m normally attracted to tall men- but he makes up for it in a hundred other ways!

My amazing girlfriends are kind enough to let me disect their adventures when I need inspiration, or even without their knowledge. They all have jobs, families, and reputations to uphold and it is far from my responsibility to take a risk with any of these things. The only people I’ve come clean to are the relationships secure enough to handle hearing when I think they’re wrong or who have proven that they may disagree with my actions but still refrain from judgment.

Finally, one of the reasons that I insist on anonymity is the same reason that I could never work in a strip club- I imagine my family walking through the door. Although I have amazing relationships with my parents, I don’t want them reading more than I would cough up over a phone conversation. I have a hard enough time with the fact that my Mom has a MySpace account! I can handle constructuve criticism and am rarely ashamed of my actions (or at least good at rationalizing them to myself), but that doesn’t make me eager to have a conversation over Thanksgiving dinner about every mistake I make in the aspect of life where I feel most self-conscious.

And for the record, that’s not even me in the picture.

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