By nature, I keep things close to my chest. Even my best friends sometimes struggle to break me out of my solid shell and see my soft, vulnerable side. With my career, though, you would never guess I’m a reserved person.

I share my deepest, darkest secrets online for a living. In other words, I am a lifestyle blogger. 

About two years ago, I wrote very publicly about an intimate relationship. With the rise of relationships/sexuality content on the platform I used, I figured there was no harm in blogging about my latest love. Amore inspires the heck out of most authors — myself included — and readers eat lovey-dovey literature up. This topic is a classic win-win for the creator and the consumers.

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Since time immemorial, artists of all varieties have expressed their affections through their work. From poets to painters to musicians, their greatest muse is their beloved. We consider luring eyes onto our work by incorporating sex to be a modern problem, but love stories are a tale as old as time. 

At first, blogging about my Boo and I seemed to enhance the infatuation experience. I began keeping a public chronicle during the honeymoon stage. My posts at the time reflected the pie-in-the-sky, rosy view through which I viewed the relationship.

As it always does, the passage of time allowed the cracks in the bond to show. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to blog about the fall from grace when my readers were interested in hearing about a slice of enamored heaven. 

The story I told to the public became the story I told myself.

I gaslit myself about budding blemishes in the once impeccable union.

It’s normal to ignore early writing on the wall. Since there was so much at stake, though, I found it more tempting to preserve the illusion of an ideal.

As any blogger knows, readers enjoy reliability. They like the certainty of consistent topics, tone, and storylines from their favorite online journals. When a writer deviates from the established pattern, it can throw regular readers for a loop and spark a sense of betrayal in the audience. 

After all, they visited your site expecting a certain kind of content. Once you stop delivering on that expectation, things can change between the reader and the writer. This dynamic put pressure on me to maintain the status quo online even if the IRL situation began to crumble.

Unfortunately, I was powerless to change the facts of the story I was telling.

This was not a Harlequin novel; it was real life.

While I avoided detailing the messy bits of the downfall for the sake of myself and the other party, my radio silence on the subject probably tipped some readers off that my fairytale romance hit a reality …….