When you use your phone to tweet, read blogs, and perv to homemade porn as often as Jill and I do, people are bound to notice. If we had a dollar for every time a a relative at a family gathering asked, only half-kidding, whether the two of us were texting each other as we jabbed away at our smartphones like gunshot victims desperately clicking their morphine buttons, we’d have a small fortune. Perhaps not enough of a fortune for us to retire immediately and live a life of leisure, but certainly enough to justify traveling the world to visit and fuck our favorite sex bloggers and Twitter friends.
If that weren’t enough, I have a tendency to read blog comments as soon as, or shortly after, they come in. If Jill and I are together, chances are that I’ll read them to her, or at the very least call her attention to them. It doesn’t matter where we are, or who’s around. Hey, call me crazy but to me it seems pretty normal for a married man to show his wife something on his phone in a semi-surreptitious fashion without everyone in the vicinity asking to be let in on the secret. Because it is apparently not, at least in my social circle, this is a habit I need to break posthaste.
As we’ve said elsewhere on this blog, most of the people we know personally have no idea it exists. This includes both of our extended families, most of whom would likely not approve. The handful of people who are aware of this blog are those we trust implicitly. To be fair, however, were we starting the blog today, we might be a bit more judicious with regard to who we tell. Our decision to let certain friends – again, close, trusted friends – in on it was made out of our own need for validation when we began blogging. We no longer feel this need. At this point, we are somewhat relieved that these friends no longer visit, and we choose to believe that they’ve all forgotten the URL.
Last week, we met M for lunch. In the middle of food, drink, and conversation, I got an email notification about a comment that needed approval. I told Jill that we’d gotten a blog comment. Then I remembered that we weren’t alone.
“Blog comment?” M asked, one eyebrow raised quizzically. Though I couldn’t see Jill’s expression, I could imagine the “Oh you stupid moron” look she was likely giving me.
Being just as sarcastic as I am, I suspect that M takes everything I say with a grain of salt. Quick on my feet, I replied, “Yeah, I just launched a blog detailing my work on the first artificial heart.” Not sure out of which orifice I pulled that particular lie, but I was confident that I had spun it along the lines of “I like to say stupid shit that has no basis in reality” as opposed to “I am trying to distract you from something I didn’t mean to say in your presence.”
It worked. After a possibly unconvinced, “Oh really?”, conversation shifted to Dick Cheney’s heart transplant. On the way home, Jill said that it was lucky that M hadn’t pressed the issue. But what I think she meant was that I need to be a hell of a lot more careful, lest someone much nosier than M gets wind.
In retrospect I could’ve handled it better; I’ve had vanilla blogs in the past, and had I explained that the comment was in relation to one of them, she would have bought it. She’s not the sort to ask for proof. She trusts us. Why, then, do we not trust her?
On the contrary, we do trust her. M attends family functions, including birthday parties and the like. She is frequently in close proximity to our parents, and to Jill’s siblings. Given some of the things that have transpired between the three of us, if we didn’t trust her we would allow her absolutely no contact with anyone who might be offended to hear about them. It’s true that she has a boisterous personality and at times lacks a decorum filter – these are things that make us good friends – but we know she’ll never blurt something out for the sake of getting attention, never use our relationship as leverage, never tell anyone anything we didn’t want her to.
We do trust her, about as far as we do any of the friends who actually know of this blog. But as I stated above, were the blog launched today certain of those same friends might not be made privvy; at present we are more concerned with discretion than we ever were in the past, and no longer so desperate for validation that we need to out ourselves as sex bloggers. It is for this reason that M, like most of the people we know personally, remains blissfully unaware.
I’d like to say that even if we didn’t trust her to put our experiences in a vault and keep them there, it’s one thing to have experienced something and have stories but it’s something else entirely to have a website – complete with pictures – to share on your iPhone while drinking with mutual friends at a bar. But the truth is that if we didn’t trust her to put our experiences in a vault and keep them there, we wouldn’t have had these experiences in the first place.
She’s trustworthy. If we had to pick someone to tell about our blog tomorrow, she’d be as good a person to tell as any. In fact, she’d be better. After all, in a manner of speaking she’s already involved. But barring some unforeseen extenuating circumstances, we think the days of telling personal acquaintances about this blog are over.
-Jack
i can totally relate 😉
Thank you for a very thoughtful post Jack and Jill. Being new to sex blogging I can understand the need for validation. We have had the fleeting thought of sharing with the closest of our open-minded friends, but have kept the promise not to. It has been a little bit of a challenge. We read your post together and it reaffirmed our desire to keep it completely anonymous. We shared pictures of ourselves for the first time today and that really makes it more real for me.
Then of course we had to go read some more about M… very sexy stuff there, Jill 😉
I have learned over time that the vast majority of people can’t keep a secret. I only tell family members information that I wouldn’t mind everyone else knowing about, because that is going to be the end result.
It is such a difficult line to walk, and it is very hard to contain worlds separately, especially when your more private world is just as important to you! It’s bound to come up; I fight hard to downplay it. If I’m with RL friends I might just casually say “Yeah, well I was talking to my friend Jack and…” which doesn’t tend to raise questions. Thankfully.
Much harder when I’m drunk though…
I think your decision to change to “don’t tell” is a much better policy especially since you now have a child. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your sexuality but many in our society think enjoying sex and sharing the enjoyment publicly is wrong–they’d judge you negatively. You don’t need that coming back to bite you in the ass. That’s what Jill is for 😉
-H
Hits home with me. Thanks for writing eloquently what I can’t. X
A few times, once in front of Vincent’s mom and once in front of my dad, Jody has mentioned the blog. Thankfully they didn’t hear, but if they had… I’m not quick on my feet like you are and it would have been AWKWARD.
I’m glad to be among your trusted group of real life friends who know about this blog.
We have been talking about whether there is anyone we can tell. Especially as right now we have a few friends going through trying time in their relationships, and sometimes D just wants to say “go read this post on our blog!” It’s a big step. Of the people I know who’ve told someone recently, they all had positive experiences. I’m sure we’d have positive reactions, but we’re just not sure we can trust others not to tell.
As an owner of a vanilla blog and a sex one I completely understand this. My mother knew about the erotica I write but not the other stuff. I think it is hilarious how some friends think it is awesome that I host giveaways for sex toys on my vanilla blog but would have a huge issue about even knowing that I had a sex blog..
I agree with you totally. S knows about my blog and my brother by total accident, but otherwise I don’t want anyone knowing, really because of the awkwardness of having to talk about it.
When I first started reading the post and you were mentioning your phones I thought you might be going off in a direction of someone seeing something on your phone at some point. It’s a nightmare I have that someone will see something, but I have to keep things updated by phone a lot.
Nice work on the artificial heart line!
This is something I have struggled with over time I have to admit. On one hand, while I am proud of what I have created with my blog, only a handful of people from my “normal” life are aware of it. I think the reason why most of keep these things secretive is the fear of judgement!
No one likes to be judged, even when we in our own hearts know we are doing nothing wrong. Having said that, it is refreshing to see a blog such as yours where you are both so open about the things that happen in your life together.
I can totally relate to this post. I too have struggled with not being able to share my blog with people I would really have loved to out of the fear of judgment. I am however grateful for the avenue and freedom anonymous blogging has given me. I agree with JM when it says that it is absolutely refreshing to have both of you be open with us and others. Very many couples don’t share such openness and it is something to be greatly admired in you.