My wife, Steph, and I have certainly had our ups and downs. (Anyone who knows me, especially, knows how thick headed I can be.) At times I've tried to come up with clever ways of venting my frustrations (my way of getting my head back to level) online in a posting or some somewhat vague discussion of an irritating subject or situation. I always felt uneasy, though, about getting into too much detail, as it is what I consider a very private part of my (and Steph's) life. I doubt I'll ever fully divulge anything that happens in any of my relationships out of respect and concern for myself and especially the others I'm dealing with. When I happened across Chris's (Pirillo's) latest post this morning (and it has been a few days or weeks since looking at his site), I thought about how openly some of the disputes between he and Ponzi have been laid out for all of us to gawk at. Is this good? Is it good for them? I honestly don't know. There is probably only one person in my life (outside of my wife) who has gone through all of my trials and tribulations with me. I'm glad he's the only other one who knows my deepest, darkest secrets. I'm always concerned that there will be a time when something I made public will come back to haunt me. In the age of no boundaries and openly hard core pornography (and I'm not just referring to pictures and video), it seems like we've forgotten that there are private topics that the world doesn't need to know about. I'm not particularly critical of Chris and Ponzi's discussion - there does seem to be a line drawn, over which neither of them appears to step in their online discussions about one another. In fact, it is fascinating to see some aspects of something so complicated that armies of psychologists will continually come up with different answers and reasoning for our behavior: relationships. The danger is simply that we will judge both of them on the basis of what little we probably know about either of their personalities. The fact is that I can hardly explain myself to anyone around me without going into long dissertations about my likes, dislikes, rants, raves, philosophical ideas, etc. If anyone took time to read through everything I've posted to the net, they would still only have a small glimpse of who I am. Perhaps some out there are relatively simple and transparent, but I doubt that many of us/them are (when judging others we wish we were, but... we aren't). For me the irony is that even though I find some of what Chris and Ponzi have posted to be trite. If they think their latest snafu is bad or reason enough to dump the other, they're sadly shallow. And that's the whole point I'm trying to make: I doubt that is the case and imagine we are seeing a very small sliver of what is really going on. At least I hope so.
While technology has gotten us closer to one another, it is still only providing us with a way to see a shadow of the other. It's like Plato's Allegory of the Cave: all we're seeing is shadows of the others. We can only surmise what is really happening. Analogously, we can only see more when we come into the light. You combine the discussion being referenced with use of video, sound, writing and some holographic stuff and maybe we can come halfway out the cave. Who has time for this, at that point? We also have our own lives to run... We just aren't there, yet...
