I’m not going to blog about dating anymore

That’s right — no more blogging about my love life. That’s actually easy to do because …I don’t have a love life! At least, not yet. But if romance is ever going to happen, the relationship will only flourish if I have A Real Private Life.

This feels pretty radical for me. After all, I’ve been happily living out loud on my blog. Floating my stuff into the public domain has been liberating! In fact, I think I’ve unburdened myself to the point where I’m ready to re-explore experiences off the page in a whole new way.

Of course, I’ll still blog my heart out. But I feel like it’s time to set boundaries between my public and private selves. I want to nurture the private me, a woman who can contentedly be with Someone Special without needing to boil our relationship highlights down to a 600-word post that I’ll tweet about in a 120 characters or less.

Oh, there’s nothing wrong with doing that! It’s just that I’ve also got my heart set on being with a man from my generation. A 50-something guy who knows what it was like to be a child in a pre-Internet world. He remembers where he was when Pres. Kennedy was assassinated.

As a kid, he probably had a black-and-white TV. As a teenager, he bought vinyl records (but let’s hope he had the good taste to bypass the man trend in platform shoes!). He is someone who hears a certain specific clicking noise and can instantly identify it as the sound of a manual typewriter. He understands how these moments shaped me because they’re part of him too.

On the other hand, there might be a 50-something dude out there who is totally cool with me blogging about What We Did Last Night. Although, I have to say, I would probably think he was nuts. Why does anyone need to know what I’m feeling about him that very second? Can’t I simply enjoy the tenderness of sharing a moment with this man and seeing what develops? Am I capable of being alone with him, just the two of us?

In other words, I’m interested in an old-fashioned concept spelled I-N-T-I-M-A-C-Y.

If you’re reading this and you blog about your love life, please, this post is NOT a judgement on you. There’s tremendous bravery involved in putting your personal life out there. It’s just that I’ve also realized how much courage it takes to be alone with someone. In real time. With no audience.

And I’d like to go down that path.

Update, Oct. 14, 2013: Hmm, well. Um…so I didn’t stick to this decision. You’ll find that I went back to do a few more dating posts. But I’m going to close the curtain again. I need to figure out what it means to have a private life.   :)