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A brilliant blogger I follow, Glennon Melton of Momastery, recently announced she was separating from her (super hot) husband.  This was unnerving.  Lately, it seems like the big lady bloggers’ marriages have been crumbling like cookies (see: Mighty Girl and Dooce).

Could be pure coincidence.  If half of all marriages end in divorce, some of those marriages are bound to belong to bloggers.  (And there are so goddamned many bloggers.)   But I can’t help wondering if there’s a connection – like, if inviting a few thousand strangers into one’s relationship has consequences.  Is complaining bad karma?  Does bragging tempt fate?

 

When I started blogging, I didn’t draw any hard and fast line between private and public – I’ve just been going with my gut.  And my fail-safe is showing every blog to Dave before I publish.  Usually, he’s fine with personal stuff.  His typical feedback is “make it shorter.”  He’s an editor.

Dave knows if he says something totally ridiculous it’s going to end up in the blog.  But he also knows that I’ll never sell him out.  He is more important than my blog.

Of course, that can be limiting.

Remember the last post I published, about our family trip?  The reason Dave isn’t in any of the pictures I used is that we were busy having a big old fight, and had retreated to separate corners.

Calm before storm.

I can’t really recall what the fight was about.  It came from a place of him working insane hours at his job and me feeling Hulk-like rage from all the IVF hormone shots and both of us deserving some help and pampering that we can’t possibly get right now.

We worked it out, and when the storm passed I was left feeling lighter – light enough to blog about the sillier parts of our Thanksgiving trip and for that skewed version to still feel authentic to me.   Turning fight-water into blog-wine.

Could I have written a juicier, probably pretty relatable tale of he said/she said?  Sure.  Only then it would have lived online forever, etching an otherwise fleeting argument into stone.  I think I prefer to let these things evaporate.

On the flip side, I was recently researching single mom blogs for a magazine piece I was writing and noticed something interesting.  Every time I came upon a well-written, popular blog about single motherhood, it would turn out that the author was no longer single.   Ms. Single Mama married in April.  Single Mom Seeking remarried AND had a new baby.

And I wondered, how much did blogging contribute to those women finding love?   Maybe blogging was good therapy, healing wounds, opening hearts and doors.  Maybe all that writing with intention and passion about hopes and dreams worked like a magic spell.

Maybe I should be writing more about how badly I want another baby, if I can find a non-cliché way to say it.

Is blogging bad for your marriage?  I don’t know — I’m not even married.    To those of you who read and write blogs – when it comes to relationships, do you think baring all is helpful or dangerous?

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