(If you’re not a daily reader at Shmittenkitten.com, you’re not internetting correctly.  The kind folks over there give me a regular forum with which to embarrass myself, but this time I ventured outside my usual “Things That Make Me A Bad Boyfriend” territory to try something new.  I’m pretty happy with the results.  Thanks to SK for letting me re-post the blog here.  Go check them out and say hi.)

It’s almost a requirement in the dating world nowadays. You meet someone new at a party, you hit it off, and then over the next few days, you do the required Internet due diligence: check the Facebook profile, read her tweets, scope out her blog, all in search of any red flags. Inevitably, there’s always one or two. Maybe she listed a band you can’t believe she’d actually like, or maybe her tweets are filled with typos and abbreviations like “U R 2 COOL”, or maybe she’s espousing radical Sarah Palin-style political views on her blog.

What the hell did people do before the Internet allowed you to lurk the various online personas of the person you’re interested in? I guess you had to – gasp – have real-life conversations and find out all this stuff slowly over several weeks? My God, who has time for that?! We are in the digital age, people!

Okay okay, I digress. The point I’m trying to make is that I’ve checked your Facebook profile, your blog, your tweets, and I can’t find a damn thing, not even an unflattering photo you forgot to untag yourself from. You like good music, like the same cheesy movies that I do, and you seem to be constantly doing really cool shit. Come clean: What are you hiding?

After clicking on the 20th cute picture of you at a party that looks way more fun than anything I did last week, now I’m worried about what happens when the tables are turned. Are you checking my Internet shit and judging me? Oh god, what if I don’t add up? You’ve got me agonizing over my next tweet and I just deleted my blog entry defending the artistic merits of Air Supply. I gotta make sure I’m at my digital best for you!

As a person who reveals my faults and embarrasses myself on the Internet on a regular basis, I’m impressed by how buttoned-up you seem to be. Granted, I never got around to checking your Friendster profile, but I assume you’ve got that on lockdown, too. So to all you girls with the hilarious blog entries, correctly-spelled tweets, and artsy photos on your Flickr, I tip my hat to you. Why don’t you and I check in somewhere together on Foursquare soon?