What you say in public, and what you tell someone in private.

If you’re anything like me, you don’t really have secrets. You’re an open book, and you enjoy being an open book, but troubles arise when you chat as if you were a celebrity giving an interview with everyone you meet. You talk about your private life and tell about your private affairs, beliefs, and philosophy as if they were either your best friend or, indeed, a talk show host. If they’re not a talk show host, they’ll take your openness as personal friendship, and that can be a bit of an issue EVEN IF you wrote all of that stuff in your blog or in your very intimate autobiography.

The problem is this: People who haven’t got enough interest in you to actually to find out what you’ve published or said in public can still be more than happy to hear it from you directly because your relationship is PERSONAL. They may not have a TRUE interest in you as a person but are more than happy to be personal friends with you… And as I quipped some time ago, friends and fans are different in that your fans actually care about you, how you’re doing, and what and how you think.

Celebrities are often trying to keep their private lives private, which is fair enough if you feel like that, but I’d personally test people: Do you know what my dog’s name is? Do you know if I have cats? Because that’s what “real fans” will be like; they may not stalk your private life like that, but they’ve paid attention. I know my idol’s dogs’ names even though I haven’t been snooping; I paid attention to what they were posting because everything they say is interesting to me, regardless of whether there’s a personal relationship with this person on the horizon or not. OF COURSE, I’ll be more interested if there is a potential relationship ahead, but if even at this stage you cannot bother to check out someone’s Facebook profile, your interest in them runs very, very shallow, I think.

It is a bit of an irony how we try and hide our personal blogs from unwanted eyes, but the truth is, sometimes you cannot make your friends or family members to pay attention to your website or anything that requires more than lazy scrolling, even if you paid them. Even then, can they bother commenting? Do they glance through what goes past their screen and tap “like” to get away with it, or is their interest deeper than that? Is it consistent?

Don’t worry about “stalking.” Public posts are public for a reason. And your real friends and truthfully interested potential lovers would read them.

Personally, I’ll have to slip this into my conversations: “Have you ever read my blog?” and pay the fuck attention to what they reply before I tell them anything of importance about myself. “What, I didn’t know you had a blog!” “So you haven’t read my profile, then, either. Well, you don’t have to. It’s written only for people who are interested in me and what I have to say, anyway.”

See?

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