The Decline and Fall of the Private Self

Once upon a time, people kept secrets. Today's tell-all bloggers and MySpace denizens have made the notion of a guarded personal life feel obsolete. What effect does such exposure have on the psyche?

By Carlin Flora, published on May 01, 2007 - last reviewed on July 17, 2007

She's even found that her "open diary" can be a helpful supplement to pillow talk. "Sometimes I wake up on a weekend morning and I'm really depressed but can't explain why," Kendall says. "So I'll sit down and post about what's going on in my head. And my fiance will realize what I'm doing. He'll read it and then he'll come in where I'm huddled under the covers, and he'll say, 'OK, I get this, let's talk about it.' "

That "post-posting" conversation is crucial to fostering intimacy and understanding in the wake of a disclosure. "Writing things down and getting reactions is a start, but I don't think it's an end point," says Singer. "You need a sustained reaction from a concerned and involved listener, so that the story doesn't just end, but keeps getting written. The two of you write it together."

Otherwise, Singer says, the solo secret teller runs the risk of turning herself into an object in a story, of dissociating from her "real" life to the point where she feels like events happen to her persona and not to her. Spinning questionable actions into an amusing read can even reduce her guilt—she may start feeling less responsible to the flesh-and-blood people in her life and more beholden to her online readers. "Those situations were funny to me," Cutler says of her blog material. "It's the sort of thing where you see things happening and you can feel detached, where you think, 'I can't wait to tell my friends about this!' Maybe it's a weird coping mechanism."

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Blogging may have helped Cutler justify her own actions. Or maybe, as she says, she never had qualms about them in the first place. But without their permission, she dragged other characters onto her stage. Robert Steinbuch claims in his lawsuit that he was subjected to "humiliation and anguish beyond that which any reasonable person should be expected to bear in a decent and civilized society."

For every citizen who employs freedom of speech to the hilt, there's someone equally determined to keep a few gems—or at least trysts—to herself. And those impulses can co-exist in one person. Cutler says she gleaned insight into her D.C. affairs when writing her novel, The Washingtonienne. But she's not interested in disclosing it. "In a way," she says, "that's for me to know."