Voyeurism

I find myself feeling like a voyeur lately. Here's the situation: There are two couples whose blogs I stumbled upon because they comment on one of my favorite blogs. They both started dating in college and are now in their mid-20s, and they both lived in Washington until last fall when the girlfriend of each couple moved away for grad school/fellowship.

One of the couples had separate blogs and it sort of became clear through my occasional reading of them that they had broken up. This was confirmed recently in a comment on the aforementioned favorite blog.

The other couple had a joint blog. This week, they each posted that they would not be blogging at that site anymore and that they would each probably start their own blogs. That means they broke up, right?

The whole situation has me conflicted. On the one hand, they feel sort of like friends. I've been reading about their lives for a couple of years, and I feel like I know them. Except that I don't actually know them. Nor do I know anyone who knows them. (Although, once I saw one of the guys at the Bread Line.) On the other hand, they're sort of like characters on a TV show or celebrities. Except not really. So now I feel weird about knowing so much about them. Like, I decided not to link to them because it would seem really strange for them to know that a complete stranger is talking about their relationships on the internet.

Anyway, this is not really pop-culture related, but it does touch on how blogging creates relationships with people that don't it into any defined category.