An ex-boyfriend of mine once received this pearly nugget of dating advice:

Be yourself...just not, y'know, so MUCH yourself.

Having dated him, I can say with certainty that his friend's advice was completely spot-on. And my guess is that my ex would totally agree. There's a fine line betwixt being yourself and exposing every last bit of your soul to sunlight. And this isn't just in regards to dating - each blog post we write, each 140 characters we Tweet - we reveal something further about ourselves, even if it's that we had fried food for lunch. (I know, I know, I shouldn't have...)

That's not to say that you should pretend to be someone else, a la Lisa Simpson in the Summer of 4 ft. 2. (Which brought us the classic Okay, calm down, it was just a bird, you don't control the birds, you will someday but not today.)


We all have our particular quirks (and kinks!), so deciding what you're upfront with and what's best left to the process of discovery can be confusing.

A guy friend of mine was writing his Nerve.com dating profile, and in it he had included a line about how he understood that walking in stilettos was a pain since he had to dance in them every weekend - because he was a member of the local Rocky Horror Picture Show cast.

I was thinking of taking that line out, he told me.

I told him to keep it in.

My reasoning was as follows: he participated in Rocky Horror shows every weekend. This wasn't an occasional hobby, this was an integral part of his life. Someone who would potentially date him had to be cool with that - and the fact that her boyfriend might have better legs than she did.

I've been blogging for over ten years now, but my litmus test on what I choose to reveal about myself has not changed. The question I always pose to myself is:

Is this a story I would tell in person? Would I be mortified to look a reader in the eye knowing that they know this about me?

Answering those questions now avoids a bucketload of potential awkwardness later.

Blogging is a fab platform to reveal the truthiness about ourselves, but there's a fine line between exposing our vulnerability and exposing ourselves to a live studio audience. In a Google-Indexed Universe where the lines between online and offline lives are blurred, you don't have to fill in all of the blanks.