Sep 19, 2007 10:50 AM
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New York, 12:35 AM
Wed Feb 10
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My friend Alice likes to say that we're living in the Too Much Information Age, and you don't have to look further than any breakup between any two people who both have blogs to understand what she means by that. And if those two people are both Internet-created pseudocelebrities, you have the voyeuristically fascinating, oddly revelatory theme park of narcissism that is the Julia Allison—Jakob Lodwick breakup.
Before blogs, if some dude you were dating didn't have the balls to break up with you in person, you might show his Dear Jane letter to a few of your closest girlfriends. Dating advice columnist and Star talking head Julia Allison, being Julia Allison, sent her friends the email in which CollegeHumor and Vimeo cofounder Jakob Lodwick dropped her like a hot potato minutes after he sent it to her.
Later, of course, she posted it on her blog.
She had sort of broken up with him first, though, or tried to—she was upset because he'd blown her off, but somehow found time to update his blog, Obeastiality. "I'm upset with you because I feel like you're putting me in a position where I have to—for my own self-respect—stop seeing you," she wrote to him.
FYI, ladies? Never do this! When you send the "I'm sort of dumping you but leaving the door open for you to say you still care" email, you are basically sending a letterpress-printed hand-calligraphied invitation that says, "Dump me please."
And that's what Jakob did.
You deserve more respect than I've been treating you with. I think you pretty much nail it in this email. I tend to walk all over girls I date, in the sense that they aren't as high a priority as they ought to be. You are not an exception, and I will only grow more selfish (inconsiderate) in the future. For example, this week will be worse than last week.Boy, we weren't exaggerating when we called him the "Hot Jerk" of the College Humor boys. Okay, well, we were exaggerating about the hot part.
I am not capable of giving you what you deserve in a relationship, even an "alternative" relationship, so, we should stop seeing each other. I think you are awesome, but I think it's impossible to be together.
Now, the high road to take in an instance like this is: Get angry, sure! Bitch about the jerk you wasted a few months with to your close friends. Take a lot of hard yoga or kickboxing classes or whatnot and buy yourself some new shoes and have sex with a 23-year-old! But bloggers don't think like that—at least, not right off the bat. Their first impulse is, of course, to blog it out.
"And so there it is, the demise of a budding relationship. All over... what, exactly?" Julia wrote. Well, if we had to wildly guess? We'd say that writing about a relationship while you're in it, especially in a public forum, always kills it, unless you're Calvin Fucking Trillin. And if we wanted to delve a little deeper, we'd say that the funny thing about the critiques of each other that Julia and Jakob have posted on their respective blogs could just as easily be about themselves.
Here's Julia on Jakob: "He's an intriguing, colorful, free-spirited, deeply creative soul. He is also aloof and self-centered and unapologetically narcissistic, which in moderation would be fine, but he pushes the boundaries towards 'asshole.' He's incredibly erratic—immature with bursts of maturity. Myopia with bursts of self-awareness. Selfishness with bursts of... well... there were a few moments—tiny glimpses—of who he could be if he took into account the feelings of others. It was something very special. I really liked that person—there I saw joy and an energy, an active curiosity, an exploratory mind with a lot of passion."
And here's Jakob on Julia: "You cannot build a media shrine to yourself when your self is shaped primarily by someone else."
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