SO's on LJ?

[jay]

My primary, Pat, now has her own LJ page (see patgreene). This should be interesting... will there be entries that we don't want the other to see (say, venting about the other)? Should we be on each others' friends list? I'd be interested if anyone reading this has experience/advice... this is my first SO that has had an LJ account. Although she seems a bit unsure about the medium, so far...

Comments

[rosefox]

I would certainly say you should be on each other's friends lists. I would also say that yes, there will probably be things you don't want each other to read, and that there's nothing wrong with that. Venting where the people you're venting about can't see or hear it can be exceedingly useful, as long as you use it as a tool to organize your thoughts and bring it up more calmly to those people later. If you find yourself wanting to keep a lot of secrets, that's an important thing to know, too.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Iain and I both have livejournals, and are not on each other's friends lists.

It's a bit of a weird situation because livejournal started out as something quite different to me than it tends to be to my wombat/alt.poly friends, and I still want to preserve what it was meant to be. Originally, it was a way of getting closer to a particular group of people at a particular time, and it's since become something like a mixture of that and a writing journal. When friends from other walks of life (very very other, to some extent) started adding me, I had to make a decision about who would be on my friends list if I didn't want to change the whole tone of my journal, and I finally decided on three criteria: people who a) are friends of mine, b) are readers of mine, and c) keep their own livejournals get added once they add me.

I've found myself really wishing the livejournal folks had decided to call the "friends" list something more neutral, because I'm certainly better friends with some of the people who aren't on my friends list than I am with some of the people who are. I'm not snubbing people; I'm simply trying to preserve the journal as the particular tool it was supposed to be rather than remaking it entirely.

-J

[fluzby.livejournal.com]

It's fairly easy to set up a friend's list minus one person. That way, you could have Pat on your friends list but still be able to vent without her seeing it.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

You can set up custom friends lists and leave each other off for certain posts, if you want.

Of my partners, one has a journal and the other doesn't, but he knows he can look at my journal if he wants to, even the locked posts. Though I've vented here before, I would never discuss with him online anything that I won't discuss in person before, or very soon after I've said it here.

[geekchick]

I have a couple of SOs who are on LJ, and we're each on the other's friends lists. Hasn't seemed to be a problem yet, although one of them really only has an account as far as I can tell in order to read friends-only posts. What I've done about entries which I may or may not want everyone on my list to see (it's not specifically because of my SOs) is set up a few friends groups with various subsets of my friends list so that I can get something out of my system and yet still limit who gets to read it.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

My entire household - SOs, SO'sSOs (Signifigant Other's Signifigant Others), and CNSO (Currently Nobody's Signifigant Other) - are on LJ. I have something like five or six different friends list, though I rarely use most of them. Uh... datapointing, or something, which I originally typoed as "datapoinging" - heh. :)