Once when I had been dating a man for a few months and it was going really, really well– flowers at my door and long kisses at subway entrances and those unmistakable rosy cheeks–he read my journal when I wasn’t home.
I actually understood the impulse. When I’d been younger, I’d been the type to ransack everyone’s drawers. I never took anything; I just liked to know the whole playing field. Being intuitive meant I could fill in most gaps myself, but I preferred access to all information. Then one day I read a letter to a boyfriend’s roommate. It was from a guy with whom I’d enjoyed a heavy, unconsummated flirtation during college. He was a Marlboro Man sort from Montana with long legs and a craggy uneven smile that was just rare enough that you felt it in your toes when he beamed it at you. This was back in the early 90s, when people still hand-lettered long missives to each other. (I still do; it’s so private and sexy.) This cowboy had written to my boyfriend’s roommate about a woman he had just begun dating. She’s tall, she’s blonde, she’s funny, he’d written. She’s just like Lisa Rosman except she’s not a crazy bitch.
Well. I pulled back like I’d been slapped, which I basically had been. Because the breeziness with which my former crush tossed off that assessment suggested it was commonly held. I’d known my boyfriend’s friends viewed me as challenging, even high-strung. But until then I hadn’t clocked how much they disliked me. “Crazy bitch” was the most dismissive, violent epithet you could level at a self-possessed woman, and I’d wanted to scream at these guys, school them in no certain terms. But doing so would only have validated their assessment since in fact I HAD SNUCK INTO SOMEONE’S ROOM AND READ THEIR LETTERS.
The combination of fury and shame was enough to curtail my snooping habit forever, especially since I could not do anything with information obtained through such improper channels.
So when my beau–I’ve referred to him as The Artist elsewhere–read my journal, I felt absolutely no compunction about what he’d read.
———————–
We’d been having 
sex for three days straight, and I’d finally untangled from his embrace so I wouldn’t get fired from the copy editing job from which I’d been calling out. He looked so pretty all tousled in my bed that I let him languish there as I hustled into the city, all smeary lips and far-away eyes. It was this time of year, too, so you can only imagine what kind of magic was evident to everyone I encountered on the subway and in my office.
But when I came home, ready for Round 2, I found the bed empty. Primly made, even.
For three weeks, he barely got in touch. The midnight calls stopped. So did the 3 am visits, when he’d been slipping into me after bartending at the old Italian restaurant where he charmed patrons with his long lashes and old-timey slang.
Finally, I put on some very bright lipstick and marched over to the loft he shared with three louche roommates–dark eyes and dangling cigarettes, you know the type.
“What’s up with you?” I demanded.
At first he gave me the high hat, but after I sat on his face for a while he said, “I know you think you’re smarter than me.”
“Huh?” I said. I did think that, but wasn’t about to damn myself unnecessarily. His relative intelligence had little bearing on the kind of extracurriculars in which we’d been engaging so satisfactorily.
“I read your journal,” he said reluctantly. “I wanted to read the nice stuff you were saying about me.
“Instead I saw the part where you said I wasn’t as smart as you. So, uh, fuck off.”
I shook my head. This was the deal-breaker. Not that he wasn’t a brain trust, not even that he knew I didn’t think he was a brain trust. That he’d had the nerve to invade my privacy and then act like the injured party.
We dated off and on for a long time after that. Our chemistry was always off the charts, but we never recovered our initial good will. He was always trying to regain the upper hand he’d felt I’d denied him, and I could never reconcile his self-righteousness with his lack of self-reckoning.
I think about our fall-out all the time now that people have so much access to each other’s information. I think, If you can’t stand the heat, get the fuck out of the kitchen. G-d knows the minute I start dating someone I mute all their social media and try to block information available to me through the Psychic Friends’ Network. Intimacy is best developed when a person tells you directly about themselves first. With my skill set, that’s a downright luxury–one I embrace now that I’m old enough to know better.