Caught in the Web
Time Out New York
March 12-18, 2008 
by Julia Allison

Ever since I saw Avenue Q a few years ago, whenever anyone starts a sentence with “The internet is for …” I automatically fill in “porn” in a sing-song voice, and then hum the tune in an off-key voice for the remainder of the day. It’s an annoying habit, not only because I don’t know the rest of the words, but because – let’s face it – it’s a little outdated.

The internet is still for porn, of course, but it’s also for obsessively googling your one night stand, for IM chats with your mistress, for creating websites to find girls you met on the subway, for Facebooking all of your crush’s ex-girlfriends, for blogging about your significant other (not recommended) and now – for breaking up with them via wikipedia page. Oh yeah, and selling all their shit on Ebay.

Unfortunately, the last three examples aren’t hypothetical. Recently, the harsh light of internet infamy shone on Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who broke up with his girlfriend, former Fox News commentator Rachel Marsden, on his site. She then forwarded their sordid IM conversations to the tech gossip blog Valleywag and started a revenge ebay auction with a few items of his clothing. Hell hath no fury like a woman dumped via a web page.

As she explained to me by email, “If someone’s going to behave like a douchebag - particularly in public - toward a person whom they know to have a big megaphone, then they deserve whatever they get.”

Except now everyone has access to a megaphone. The old adage of “don’t start a fight with men who buy ink by the barrel” has morphed into “don’t start a fight with women who have a DSL line.”

This, my laptop-toting comrades, is the future: Online Relationships 2.0. And it should come with a little warning label like that sad broken heart that appears when you change your Facebook status from “in a relationship” to “single.” It’s a dangerous broadband world out there, and a few unflattering photos in your google images cache are the least of your worries. Your IM chats will be archived, your emails will be forwarded, your IP address will be logged as you post your “anonymous” Craigslist casual-encounters ad.

You think you’re safe. You’re wrong.

Breaking up is often traumatic and tumultuous; you are, quite literally, going through a chemical withdrawal, a state akin to that of a recovering heroin addict. NO ONE possesses good judgment during this time. It is impossible. This is why, for years, advice columnists have suggested writing angry letters to your ex – and then THROWING THEM AWAY. Except now people vent via venomous blogs, which they eventually – once reason takes over again – delete. The only problem? The internet makes it very difficult to completely erase anything. And by then, the damage will have been done.

I should know. I tried the whole “blogging with my boyfriend” thing, as an experiment, to “delve into the inner-workings of a real relationship, with all its flaws,” as I naively wrote last November. Yeah. About that? Delve into it with your therapist. Not in a public forum, where your words, your feelings, and finally your relationship can be parsed, critiqued and ultimately destroyed by the unruly online masses. It’s not pretty, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

In fact, after ending the site, I deleted entries, writing “Technically, I’ve just made the posts private. Which is what they should have been in the first place. It’s always humbling to realize you’ve made an enormous mistake, but I know that, at the very least, my public relationship struggles in the last seven months made others feel less alone. They certainly taught me quite a lesson … just not the lesson I thought I would learn.”

That lesson? When in a relationship – and especially ending one – take a deep breath and step … away … from … the … computer.

You – and all of the people you date subsequently – will thank me.