Can you spot any differences between the following blogs?
Jake & Marissa
PB & J
Mitch and Jessica
Adrian and Emily
Neither can I.
I normally try not to break away from my normal formula of posts (videos/audio/graphics/dreams) but felt that, since I haven't posted in a couple weeks, I ought to put SOMEthing up, and announce that from now on I will select ONE couples' blog to read and use that as an update for all couples that I know.
The young, married readers of this post are probably scoffing by now, but if any given couple asks me what I know about their current goings-on, I can say, "One of you just graduated and the other is not far behind. You also just moved to a new place, and you love remembering your wedding day. You talk to family members all the time." This is all information that's been redundantly fed to me through separate blogs on the Interweb. Surely I can increase efficiency by limiting this feed to ONE.
In the spirit of Silence Dogood:
A Receipt for a Couples' Blog by
The Shark
- A title and/or URL that includes the names of both subjects
- A husband who doesn't post as much as the wife
- References to the wedding day in approximately every other post
- Mention of recent/impending relocation
- Updates on extended family members
- One blogger who is still in school, the other a recent grad
- Wedding and/or engagement photos in the title bar or profile square
Wilson Web
My Sanity
The Meanest Mom
The formula changes slightly to allow for more diversity, but generally here is the resulting recipe:
- The mother must do the bulk, if not ALL, of the writing.
- Where the mother is NOT the sole contributor, the blog's title/URL includes the surname.
- Where the mother IS the sole contributor, the blog's title/URL makes reference to her being a mother, and usually a comparison between maternity and prison.
- Tons of baby photos.
- Mention of recent/impending relocation
- Updates on extended family members
The Randle family follows the recipe with a bit of role reversal, in that Bryce generally writes more than Nancy. Most everything else is the same, although he throws in a lot of updates on his video projects and other creative endeavors, which are refreshingly interesting:
Randle Re-Runs
Thank you, married people, for giving us bachelors a template to follow in the future. :)
10 comments:
ouch! if you don't enjoy my blog, just don't read it. public ridicule isn't necessary.
Thanks for expressing your concern, Heather. The post is meant to be read kind of tongue-in-cheek, in a "poking fun" manner. I'm not really going to stop reading people's blogs, and there's nothing "wrong" with mimicking blog ideas that have been done before.
Because, really, would I have these blogs change? No. Married people have found a great way to give friends and family, en masse, access to updates on their lives, and they should take advantage of it. I can't help but think the coincidences found among so many blogs are funny, though.
I highly endorse all of the blogs noted in the post.
*Note that I made some tonal changes in the intro and conclusion that hopefully make the post not seem so much scathing as it is observational humor.
Haha, nice. You should check out this essay by Charles Lamb called "A bachelor's complaint of the behaviour of married people." (You can find it at http://essays.quotidiana.org/lamb/)
It's a delightful tongue-in-cheek rant, much like this post.
I once wrote a bad poem entitled "In the insufferable company of matrimonial friends," about that kind of behavior.
We haven't started a couples' blog because C doesn't really like the idea of posting pictures of our kids in public. She'd rather just email them to our friends. But I can pretend that it's because we're cool nonconformists.
Just because you are married does not necessarily mean that you must maintain a 'couples' blog. You are certainly free to continue writing the same riveting material as before.
While it may not be as exciting as your own writing, you will find nothing like any of the examples you have listed in my blog. :)
Shark, this blog entry pretty much sums up some of the reasons why I don't keep a blog. Life is usually pretty boring; what on earth could I post on a regular basis that people would have any interest in reading? Don't expect to find the extraordinary in a blog about ordinary people.
Shark,
I understand what you are getting at here, and I realize it is meant to be written with a sarcastic tone, but logically I am not sure why you cited our blog as one of those that fits the mold. According to your "Receipt" (I assume you mean recipe), PB&J only fits half of your bullets at worst:
-title/url: we have a nickname for the title cause I didn't want to use our real names, but I guess that would be close enough to your criteria. And we tried like 20 different URLs before we found one that hadn't been taken.
-husband/wife posting ratio: I post just as much as B does (5 posts to 4 so far).
-wedding day references: I don't think we actually have made any references to the actual day, other than "since we've been married" type comments
-relocation: we aren't going anywhere for a bit
-updates on extended family members: yes, we have one of these, but only because it was directly related to our activities for that weekend
-one in school/one not: we are both still in school
-wedding/engagement photos: guilty, but we've only been married 4 months, so we don't have a lot of other pictures to put up yet
So you can make the argument that all couples' blogs are the same, but I am going to argue that ours doesn't fit into what you have called "the same."
I generally agree with you that a lot of blogs are similar and not entirely original. That's why I made my first blog a place to keep track of scriptural insights and my second blog a place to store recipes, rather than places to write about my life. Since we started PB&J a few weeks ago (for exactly the reasons you've mentioned - to keep family updated) my posts so far have been about my Lightsaber project, redbox rentals, recipe updates, my 17th finals week, and an interesting article that I read on shoes vs. feet.
I think the reason that this post comes off other than you meant it to is because you cite as examples specific blogs of people and friends that just happen to read yours. If your recipe really holds up, I'm sure you could have found blogs of people you don't know to use as examples (just try URLs with two names in them - your first ingredient).
Hmm... I get what you're saying, but I will also argue how ours doesn't quite fit the couple formula because: (a) neither of us is still in school, and at this point I no longer consider myself to have recently been in school, (b) I don't think I mention extended family to update, only if we've seen them so I post pictures, and (c) we don't talk about our wedding a whole lot. (Except that I DID just put up some pictures of our wedding day, but that's because it was our anniversary.) And in the new blog (admittedly only up for about two days) the url does not contain our names and there are no engagement pictures.
But now we have a baby, so I guess we're not in that category anyway. I'll try to avoid turning into the other.
Give us some credit: Adrian's mom has repeatedly told us our blog is boring and she likes the kinds with pretty backgrounds and music, and we have [kindly] said absolutely not.
Oh, and yes I realize that my google picture is from our wedding. So yes, I'm guilty. But I so rarely have pictures of myself I like, and that one conveniently covers up most of my face...
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