The unprovoked e-mail from an ex — or its somewhat less intrusive social media counterparts, the unprovoked Twitter follow and the unprovoked (and likely accidental) LinkedIn network request — occupies a uniquely terrifying position in the lifecycle of a relationship.

As someone chronically unable to remain friends with former significant others, this isn’t an experience entirely alien to me. For example, 45 minutes after midnight on my last birthday, I received the following text message from David, my high school (and freshman year of college, and sophomore year of college) ex:

Being well-versed in decoding quizzical text messages from estranged exes, it was no particular challenge to translate two exploding cornucopias, a wrapped gift, and a cake to:

“Happy birthday! Even though we haven’t spoken since you skipped my housewarming party [in Queens, where the one item on the drink menu was 'Trash can punch served in an actual trash can — good luck!'] your birthday is still a recurring event in my Google Calendar, and I can’t figure out how to delete it.”

When everyone plays by the rules and sends incomprehensible text messages, the occasional missive from an ex is emotional white noise.

The lengthy e-mail from an ex is entirely another story.

“Hi Yoel,” began an e-mail from Chris (the most recent of the exes), asking to see me during a visit to New York from Berkeley. He continued:

I gave a lot of thought to whether I should write, because I see you’re nicely settled now, and I don’t want to reopen old wounds. I decided in the end that it was worth getting in touch, but of course I will understand if you can’t see me, or even if you don’t want to reply.

At some length, I got an excursus on his various comings and goings since we last spoke, as well as an apology for the hurtful manner in which he ended our relationship in June of 2010. He told me about his relief to be going back to the UK. He asked how I was doing.

And herein, the usual rules of polite conversation cease to apply. As happened while I was drafting part of this post, being asked how you’re doing by a bartender is totally innocent. Being asked how you’re doing by an ex is confrontational and unsettling. Where do you even begin to pick up the pieces? It seems somehow inadequate or insensitive to reply candidly with something like, ”Hi Chris — I’m living with my boyfriend now, we bought a stand mixer together, and I’m rewatching season 1 of 30 Rock. Hope all’s well with you!”

In the end, I settled on a pretty tame account of my recent schoolwork and what I felt was a fairly generous invitation to maintain an open channel of communication. To which I received… nothing. Which, a year ago, would have been crushing; but, as the logic of relationships goes, it’s all water under the bridge at this point.

Because the essential truth of the Estranged Ex E-mail is that, with nothing tying you together, there’s no reason to expect a particularly heartfelt or substantial conversation. At its core, this is the same problem I see with most forms of online dating: without preexisting emotional investment, the effort required to be civil to someone else often exceeds the benefit you derive from it. Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody, talks about mutual love as the grounding force of online cooperation; you contribute to Wikipedia without realizing immediate personal gain because you feel an emotional connection to your project that goes beyond economic rationality. So, too, with interpersonal communication, only we still naively believe that the act of initiating conversation with someone automatically includes sufficient emotional investment to continue that conversation when the easy preliminaries are over.

At the end of the day, I don’t begrudge Chris for failing to reply to my e-mail any more than I begrudge myself for failing to post on this blog for almost a year (or, for that matter, for failing to finish writing this post when I first drafted it in mid-December). In all likelihood, this blog would have continued to lie dormant for another year had I not received e-mail this morning informing me that someone on Thingbox rediscovered my post about the site from ages ago, and that my various electronic comings and goings are presently being mocked by that forum’s sundry participants (of which, to bring things full circle, Chris is probably one). It took a concrete reminder of the fact that even as this blog has been in my past for a year now, it’s still very much in the present for some people, to get me to start writing again. Inaction was my default, until a bunch of snarky forum posters lit the fire under my ass to (a) Google myself and see what they could possibly be reading about me, (b) transfer this domain name from GoDaddy, and (c) resurrect the emotional tie I once had to posting on this website. We’ll see how long that tie lasts this time.

For the first time in about three months, I logged onto Manhunt this morning. I woke up with an overwhelming urge to finally delete the account I created in England in the depths of my post-breakup depression. After all, I told myself, I’m in a relationship now, and like Grindr and Scruff (which have also been removed from my phone), there’s nothing Manhunt can really offer me.

A few clicks later, my account was gone. Amusingly, along with a pleasantly streamlined account deletion procedure (which is a huge improvement over the e-mail-wait-and-pray approach you used to have to take; needless to say, this isn’t my first Manhunt deletion — my disgust with the site seems to come in 18 month cycles), Manhunt displays the pictures of other users who would supposedly “miss you” after deletion. I only warranted one such user: a gentleman with the handle “friendlyotterboy,” who had, hilariously, borrowed the somewhat ridiculous hairy-chested picture I posted on my profile to use as his own. Apparently, the only person on Manhunt who will miss me is myself.

Aside from the indignities of having my online identity stolen for the purposes of facilitating someone else’s casual sex, revisiting Manhunt got me thinking about, of all people, Anthony Weiner. Setting aside the politics of the issue — I think the sexting scandal was a sufficient distraction that his resignation was in order, even though the problem lies squarely with the easily distractible American electorate, rather than with anything former-Representative Weiner said or did — I don’t know that I’ve come to equilibrium on the issue of whether, as a human being and a married man, he actually did something wrong.

Here’s a hypothetical scenario to use as a test case on the issue:

Anthony Weiner has been sending salacious pictures of himself to some of his Twitter followers (or posting them on whatever the heterosexual equivalent of Manhunt is). He isn’t, like Larry Craig, actively soliciting sex; nor, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, is he actually having an affair — he’s just sending out pictures of his junk to willing recipients. In this story, he has absolutely no intention of actually cheating on his wife by meeting another person for sex; he only wants to send out dirty pictures, for whatever reason. Further, in my hypothetical Weinergate universe, it’s possible to assert with empirical certainty that, even if the possibility presented itself (a person he sexted threw him or herself naked at his feet, begging for sex), he would never take it. He is a paragon of marital fidelity, with the possible exception of the sexting. In this scenario, has Anthony Weiner done anything wrong?

The most intuitive answer is: “no.” Marital fidelity is judged first on physical action — did you have sex with another person? — and second on intentionality. In the absence of both, reason suggests that there was no harm done.

An op-ed in the New York Times argues that, even in the absence of actual infidelity, sexting represents a sort of narcissistic turpitude that ought to be shunned in its own right:

The Internet era’s defining vice has been thrown into sharp relief. It isn’t lust or smut or infidelity, though online life encourages all three. It’s a desperate, adolescent narcissism.

…

At 46, Weiner isn’t technically a member of Generation Facebook, but he’s clearly a well-habituated creature of the online social world. The fact that he used the Internet’s freedoms to violate his marriage vows isn’t particularly noteworthy. That’s just the usual Spitzer-Schwarzenegger routine performed on a virtual plane. What’s more striking is the form his dalliances took — not a private surrender to lust or ardor, but a pathetic quest for quasipublic validation.

Okay, maybe the internet is making us all incredibly narcissistic, and maybe that manifests itself in kind of outlandish ways, a la tweeting pictures of your cock. But — and perhaps this is my own narcissism speaking — I don’t find that explanation particularly compelling. Yes, maybe we’re all self-absorbed and like clicking through our own Facebook pictures for hours on end; but when did a little amour-propre hurt anyone, anyway? If Anthony Weiner’s only sin is liking himself a little too much, then he’s a fucking saint, by internet standards.

Elsewhere in the Times, in a profile of Dan Savage’s own “monogamish” definition of marital fidelity, Mark Oppenheimer wrote,

[Anthony Weiner's] visage was insisting, night after night, that we think about how hard monogamy is, how hard marriage is and about whether we make unrealistic demands on the institution and on ourselves.

To which I can only respond: yes! The bigger issue of the Weiner scandal, for me, is what monogamy and fidelity mean, beyond the textual limits of “don’t have sex with other people.” Needless to say, my views don’t quite align with those of Dan Savage. For me, Larry Kramer put it best in the closing pages of Faggots when he wrote, of the cavalier gay sexuality of the 1970s, “We shouldn’t have to be faithful!, we should want to be faithful!” And that’s the question of Anthony Weiner: does he want to be faithful, whatever that actually means? Even if we can assert that Anthony Weiner would never violate the text of his vows, is he failing to live up to the meaning of “faithful” by sexting other women?

The answer, for me, lies in the distinction between the behaviors of single people and the behaviors of people in relationships (or marriages, for that matter). When you’re single, you’re accountable only to yourself — to your own moral principles, or lust, or narcissism, or whatever — and accordingly can pursue any of a nearly infinite number of possible single-person activities: you can shamelessly flirt with people in bars; you can hook up with someone from Grindr; you can seek out new dates on OkCupid; you can post pictures of your penis on Twitter or Manhunt or Dudesnude or, for that matter, wherever the fuck you want, because, hey!, you’re single and who cares?

(Herein, my boyfriend remarked that this post makes it sound like I frequently enjoy posting pictures of my penis online. I don’t. Seriously.)

But when you enter into a relationship, my definition of acceptable behaviors becomes a little more restrictive. The first to go, obviously, are licenses to actually do anything with other people. But shortly thereafter, I start to see things like having Grindr on your phone or maintaining a Manhunt profile or sexting as increasingly unacceptable. It’s not that they’ll necessarily lead to the sorts of behaviors that constitute by-the-books infidelity; it’s that they represent an unwillingness to leave behind the trappings of singlehood, even while reaping all the benefits of being in a relationship. It’s this one-foot-out-the-door phenomenon that frustrated me so much about OkCupid: we don’t let ourselves get invested in relationships, and then we sit back and wonder why, so often, they fail to work out.

So, by my understanding, Anthony Weiner’s great mistake isn’t infidelity — it’s a failure to embrace married life for what it is. Marriage is a symbol of commitment and compassion; while sending pictures of your penis to strangers online doesn’t preclude the possibility of those, it certainly makes them more challenging to wholeheartedly pursue. Or at least it would for me. Which is why, this morning, I found myself on Manhunt, once and (hopefully) for all deleting my profile.

Where I take Dan Savage’s point, though, is that it’s senseless to apply those same standards to everyone. At the risk of seemingly hopelessly relativistic, I’ll just say: the fact that I can’t reconcile my own Manhunt or Grindr presences with my relationship is not an indication that it’s impossible; it’s just not easy to do. Manhunt, notably, doesn’t feature any sort of field for explicitly indicating your relationship status — a seeming monogamy “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. Maybe, as Savage writes, it’s possible to reconcile commitment with flirting, online or offline. When it’s taking place online, though, the distinction between theory and practice becomes more ambiguous. And therein, by my understanding, is the root of the problem.

It’s been over two months since my last post, and it’s kind of difficult to decide where to begin with filling in the gaps in the blog-narrative of my life.

I could start with the part where I graduated from Swarthmore with highest honors, after several months of being convinced that I wouldn’t graduate at all. Even now, with a diploma in hand, I’m not convinced that Swarthmore made the right decision in conferring a degree on me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I completely faked my way through college, but I feel like a huge component of why I graduated (and, more significantly, why I graduated with highest honors) is my ability to write eloquently and quickly. While studying for the GRE, I learned that the strongest predictor of one’s score on the writing portion of the exam is how much you’re able to write in the allotted time; given I type 160 words per minute, I was able to write a great deal, and, perhaps as a consequence, I scored a 6.0 (the maximum possible score) on the GRE Writing section. I think Swarthmore operates largely along the same lines: writing engagingly is, I suspect, a reasonable substitute for writing anything particularly radical or insightful, content-wise. In any event, I graduated.

Or, I could start with the part where I decided to go to the Annenberg School for Communication at UPenn for grad school. I’m increasingly realizing that it’s both naive and premature to really discuss what I’m going to study, given I only have the most protean notions of what my research interests actually are at the moment, but the present version of the elevator speech is: I’m interested in LGBT organization and exchange online, particularly in the context of relationships and sexuality. In other words, I want to get a PhD studying more systematically all the bullshit I’ve been writing about on this blog for years. Related to my anxieties about duping Swarthmore into granting me a degree is the paranoia that, come day 1 of graduate school, the jig will be up, and someone will, finally, realize that I’m fundamentally unfit to pursue a terminal degree. Anyway, we’ll see how that goes.

Or, I could start with the part where I told my mother about my tattoo, and she’s been engaged in a fairly low-level freak-out ever since. In retrospect, I’m amazed by the extent to which telling my mother about my tattoo and coming out of the closet have been similar experiences. Both took place by e-mail; both resulted in a two day period in which my parents didn’t speak to me while they sorted out their feelings; and both felt, subsequently, like an immense relief.

Or maybe, given the gist of my last handful of posts, I could start with the part where I’m in a relationship. It’s been a bit over two months, and things are going really well — which, in part, is why I’ve found it so difficult to put together a blog post on the subject. For the last year, I’ve been in the habit of writing blog posts whenever things end badly with someone I date; but, for once, the other shoe has failed to drop. His name is Brett. (I resisted the urge to give him a Carrie Bradshaw-esque nickname; only the duds get blog nicknames, it seems. Along those lines, actually, I ran into The Russian the other week at a street fair. He had the audacity to give me a half-grin and an eyebrow raise, as if to say, “Oh, you! The crazy motherfucker who wrote me a letter! Fancy seeing you in the same time zone.” But I digress.) To give credit where credit is due, we met via OkCupid. While I don’t want to fall into the trap of absolving OkCupid of all its inadequacies now that, by sheer happenstance, I’ve met someone on the site who makes me happy, there’s a reasonable point to be made that, whatever the flaws in OkCupid’s matching algorithms and approach to dating, it led to me meeting someone I care about who I probably otherwise wouldn’t have met. (More to the point, I suppose, is my sister’s wedding this weekend, to a man she met via OkCupid.) So, there’s that.

(To briefly return to the issue of OkCupid: According to the matching algorithm, Brett and I are an 84 percent match. By comparison, the guy who first introduced me to the maddening concept of “spark” was a 93 percent match. The Russian was 91 percent. But, almost without a doubt, Brett and I are considerably better matches than I was with either of the other two guys. Which brings us back to the central issue: Is OkCupid asking the right questions? It seems like OkCupid isn’t quite getting at the more fundamental things that determine whether someone is a romantic match — or, at least, that match percentages aren’t sensitive enough indicators of those things. Within some margin of error, the match questions seem to be able to predict whether I’ll have something to talk about with someone on a first date; but they fail completely at gauging the one thing that seems to be the linchpin of Brett and I’s compatibility: his ability to both understand and, seemingly, appreciate the eccentricities, anxieties, and idiosyncrasies that make me who I am. I’d argue that there’s no algorithmic way to predict that. And that, ultimately, is where OkCupid comes up short.)

I should also probably throw in something about how I’ve recently engaged in a complete liquidation and reevaluation of my electronics. My Kindle is for sale on eBay, my 2011 15″ i7 MacBook Pro turned into a 13″ MacBook Air, and I have an iPad 2. I think, on the whole, I’ve made the right choices. The MacBook Air, while sorely in need of a faster and/or cooler-running processor (things like video chat in Gmail and Netflix still make the fans spin up, unless you have perfect ventilation under the computer), is far and away the snappiest-feeling computer I’ve ever used: applications, Photoshop included, open almost instantly, and the computer starts up in seconds. It’s still unclear to me whether my iPad is just a shiny gizmo or the device that’s going to obviate the need for me to use my laptop 90 percent of the time, but, in the last few days, I’ve become convinced that it’s a platform worth investing in. As a long-time, but not particularly verbal, iPad skeptic, this is a huge departure from my previous position of, “Why the fuck would I need that? I already have a laptop, a Kindle, and an iPhone.” All I can say is: you won’t understand it until you own one.

And then there’s the part where I’m in Florida for the summer, probably for the last time in my life. As the grad school anxieties and post-tattoo fights have shown me, there’s a pretty significant change in the timbre of the relationship I have with my parents around the corner, coming in the form of true financial independence. It remains to be seen how that will play out.

Even by my increasingly lackluster standards for post frequency, it’s been a while since my last update. There are a handful of reasons:

I’m in one of those kind of strange transitional moments in my life where the combination of needing to function on a day-to-day level and needing to figure out my path for the next five years occupies 100 percent of my available mental resources. Accordingly, writing has taken a bit of a back seat.

The biggest decision of all — where to go to graduate school — has turned into a grand emotional catch-22: on one hand, I feel fortunate to have a handful of great schools to choose from; but on the other, the sometimes perpendicular appeals of the various programs I was admitted to makes it difficult to know which is the right choice.

Add to that the stress of having to decide where to live for the next five to six years. The choice has come down to Los Angeles (attending USC), Seattle (attending the University of Washington), or Philadelphia (attending UPenn) — all of which have their own appeal, independent of the schools I’m considering. Especially in the cases of Los Angeles and Seattle, it’s difficult to know whether, quality-of-life-wise, I’d actually be happy living there for the next chunk of my life. In the case of Philadelphia, trying to reconcile the familiarity of the city and it’s ridiculously low cost of living with the kind of abject romantic unhappiness I’ve experienced while dating here makes it difficult to be objective. Put another way: separating the bad dates and the boys who’ve dumped me from the Platonic form of Philadelphia as my potential home for the next five years has proven to be exceedingly challenging, even as my romantic history is decidedly not an appropriate consideration vis-a-vis grad school selection.

When it comes to my lull in blogging, though, it’s not just that I’ve been busy; it’s that I’ve been undertaking a pretty basic reevaluation of whether maintaining this blog is actually a good thing. In the past, I’ve seen this space as serving two genuinely positive purposes: first, it gives me a place to practice my one art form — namely, writing; and second, there’s a cathartic aspect to writing specifically about bad dates and romantic dissatisfaction that I don’t find elsewhere in my life.

(To that end, a movie I saw on a date a couple of weeks ago, Heartbeats, comes to mind. One of the protagonists, a French Canadian gay with perfectly coiffed hair and neuroses that I found all-too-relatable, maintained a series of tally marks on the wall of his bathroom, each one signifying an instance of romantic rejection. Psychically, my blog posts serve the same purpose: every story about a bad date is another mark on the wall of the electronic bathroom that is yoyoel.com. It’s my way of manufacturing closure.)

I’ve always known that there exists a segment of my possible dating pool that is so unsettled by the prospect of being blogged about that they reject me out of hand as a result. And, heretofore, I’ve accepted that with the reasoning that my blog is one of those take-it-or-leave-it things about me. Shortly after my last post, though, a (former?) friend, in the context of chastising me for my post about Grindr, shared the following two thoughts:

Dude, if you had a million dollars in the bank and promised to bake me all the cookies in the world, I would not date you, if I thought for a moment the excursion might wind up on your blog.

and,

Consider the possibility that you’re projecting, knowingly or not, an aura of cruelty both in your style of writing and in what you write about.

This, from someone who, years and years ago, actually did date me, and all-too-recently propositioned me on several occasions for a threesome with him and his partner.

Anyway, this raised what I see as two essential questions about my blog and its future:

First, is there any merit to the “aura of cruelty” thing? The only other person who has ever called me cruel (to my face, at least) is my mother — a gut-wrenching, Israeli-accented “crrrrrrruel” that still makes me shudder to think about. I’ve always thought of my blog as innocently snarky; or, at worst, incidentally bitter. But cruel? That’s a line I’m not necessarily willing to cross. And if, unknowingly, I’ve been striding happily across it for the last eight years through blogging, perhaps it’s time to call it quits.

Second, and more concretely, is blogging the independent variable that I’ve been so unable to put my finger on, re: my dating failures? Almost everyone I’ve gone out with from OkCupid has confessed to at least glancing at my blog, and most of them offer, unsolicited, an opinion on the subject. On one hand, I like to think that it presents a reasonable picture of me as articulate, thoughtful, and neurotic — three characteristics that I think are broadly representative of what I bring to the table, dating-wise. But, clearly, the secondary effect is that a lot of people deem me not worth talking to, because they don’t want to risk the prospect of ending up as another entry in my dating spreadsheet, or another paragraph in a rant about poor communication. To what extent does my blog represent a dealbreaker? Or, more practically, to what extent should I care if it does?

Ultimately, I haven’t reached any grand conclusions. Maybe my blog is too much information too soon, and it’s making me functionally un-dateable. Maybe my blog is exactly enough information, and it just speeds up the process of discovering incompatibility. Or maybe, contrary to my own understanding of myself, I’m a cruel, heartless person who blogs mean things about boys. Herein I think back to the high point of Michelle Trachtenberg’s acting career, Harriet the Spy; I’m pretty sure her response to the negative consequences of writing about others was to stop doing it altogether. But I don’t know that I’m ready to take that step. Yet.

Oh, and I got a tattoo. So much for my previous conclusion that, after seeing my favorite e.e. cummings poem tattooed on a porn star (link is semi-NSFW), it would never happen.