I read a woman’s blog about her sex life with her husband and realized I was wrong about communication
The act of writing works because it is a consensual invasion of privacy.
I am new to Medium and so an algorithm makes suggestions to read various popular pieces “based on your tastes.” Today the suggested post was by a life coach who intimately detailed her husband’s 6am masturbation session and then wrote down her entire inner monologue from spying on him to ignoring him to confronting him in a respectful way that didn’t shame him (her words).
Don’t judge. I didn’t. I was too busy being astonished that any human over 35 could have a marriage in which both parties were equally indifferent to having personal privacy erased in favor of the comments and likes of dozens of strangers, a few acquaintances, and probably more than a couple of friends.
This woman clearly feels the trade is fair: her privacy for money.
But someone said she communicated her points beautifully, and it made me think.
Is the writing of intimate secrets for public consumption actually communication? I would have to say no.
- Humans love to read about secrets, the more private and unknowable, the better. We can’t help it. We just do.
- Humans love to share and discuss any secrets they have learned, but still prefer to discuss strangers’ secrets because humans also generally aspire to be trustworthy, and discussing secrets is inherently untrustworthy.
- It is not damaging to your credibility and trustworthiness to share the secrets of a stranger that you read about in a public blog, since by putting them in a place they are meant to be read, permission has been given.
- Permission doesn’t make the secrets any less intimate.
- I use the word secret because the action is inherently unknowable except by spying or by being told. Discussions of sex, masturbation, behind-closed-door conversations, things you might regularly do in a bathroom or anywhere with a locked door, these are personal secrets, by dint of being otherwise unknowable.
But why the proliferation and popularity of writing about intimate personal details? When I was a student in Columbia’s MFA program, “bleed on the page,” used to be the mantra of anyone writing nonfiction. Now it is not enough to bleed on the page, you also have to be able to describe in minute detail how it felt when you bled on the page, and what you learned from that bloody event. Nothing is too private. Nothing it worth withholding and examining in solitude.
(I am not putting down nonfiction, I am trying to understand why so many people want to be writers nowadays — and why their self-analysis isn’t in journals or iPhones kept by their beds, but instead is published immediately to WattPad or Medium or whatever social media feed is their favorite. And why these same people whose feeds are hyper-sensitive to their own needs and desires so frequently are writing about feeling lonely or not being able to connect.)
This kind of writing isn’t really anything new, although graphic personal details used to be punishable by excommunication and threats of eternal damnation and now generally are praised as “revealing” or “raw.”
But after reading this woman’s serious business-blog post about how she was able to accept her partner’s porn use since she also viewed porn, I finally understood.
The reason writers are able to bleed on the page so profusely these days is that when you are writing, you are — in point of fact — entirely alone.
Sure, you might envision the reader who might read your work, but most people writing nonfiction (as I am right now) are sitting in an empty room, thinking directly onto the page. If we are in a discourse at all, it is with ourselves (or, if you’re into sci-fi: it is with the future…I am talking directly to some imaginary future reader who is currently in my timeline eating a burrito, or having sex, or watching Netflix. I am writing in solitude. Later, you are reading this in solitude.)
We are not communicating at a simultaneous point in time.
I put forth that it is easier to be completely bare and honest in writing to a million people than it is to be honest and bare to just one person, in person (just as it takes less effort and feels, however fallibly, less personally threatening to snap and send a naked selfie than it does to go to someone’s house and take off one’s clothing) And this also explains the tendency for people to overshare on social media yet be incapable of holding a relationship for more than a few moments in real life. It explains sapiosexuality. It explains why it is possible to write a difficult blog post or story about trauma or abuse, but be still unable to tell your own therapist — whom you pay specifically for their expertise at listening to these very things you wish to talk about. It explains why the article about the woman’s sex life with her husband was frequently interspersed with comments like: “of course I was nowhere near this succinct in real life” or “it took me about ten minutes to actually say this.”
Writing is not intimate, even when you’re writing about your deepest-held secrets.
When you write, you are transferring your thoughts from your brain to your own page. It hasn’t left YOU to reach anyone else. It is internal, even though you are making it physically accessible to others.
You can still take it back.
It’s as if your secrets are a twenty dollar bill you laid out on your table to prove that you have the money. When you took the money out of your bank, you were alone. You take it out of your wallet alone, in your own kitchen. It sits on your table. In your house. And you are alone with it. Looking at it.
It isn’t until you publish that blog post that you are inviting other people into your house where the money is out on the table. They may look at it and leave. They may take it and run. You don’t know. You are not there watching them. They might do anything. (Hopefully they don’t deface it, or shame you for having it in the first place; but some trolls do just that.)
My point is that the act of writing the secret down is not communication. Some very great works are published diaries that were never intended for broad readership. The writer was working out their feelings by externalizing them so they could be examined — but they never intended for Aunt Betty and her entire book club in Toronto to discuss those feelings years later over chardonnay. Reading secrets is an invasion of privacy — and yet how delicious it is when someone hands you their diary and says, “go ahead read it, I don’t mind.”
Who can resist?
Publishing the writing is also not communication. Communication only happens when a reader reads the piece…never in real time as the piece is being typed on the page.
(Whoa, how interesting would that be? to watch a shared google doc as your favorite author’s words appear, disappear, get changed to other words?)
Meanwhile, all conversations with humans in real space and in real time are inherently intimate. Whisper any word in a crowded room and someone is likely to turn around and say “what?” Dialogues are immediate. Miscues and misinterpretations are rife and come with the territory.
No wonder it is easier to write your secrets than to speak them to the people who need to hear them. No wonder our relationships to our readers is such a strong and powerful one, and our IRL relationships are a perpetual struggle — even the best ones are unpredictable.
I used to think good writing was good communication, but perhaps good writing is actually just being connected to your OWN inner thoughts and observations and being able to translate those into written words. Communication plays little part of it because trust plays almost NO part in it. I can’t know who is going to read this. I offer it blindly and without hope that anyone will see it or take kindly to it.
And some won’t. Some will feel attacked and some will probably miss my point entirely. If we were in a room together I would sense this. I would know if I was upsetting someone or boring someone else. In writing, I have no idea.
Every audience is perfect while you are still writing!
The act of writing is a conduit to understanding — bypassing the intimacy of speech. It works because of a consensual time-delayed invasion of privacy, not an intimate shared experience. Or do you perhaps have a better way of describing our dialogue, my time traveling friend?
