I have a collection of men I no longer date who still read me. Not metaphorically. Literally.
I’m a writer and podcaster, which means I have an immense trove of content available online for anyone to peruse. I’m fully okay with living aloud in what I’ve shared. What I hadn’t fully contemplated was how that visibility would open me up to parasocial relationships — especially with men I’m dating, or have dated.
Thanks to Substack analytics, I can see when former suitors open my emails and when they click through to read or watch. I see timestamps, frequency, patterns. I can’t tell how long they linger, but I know what they return to, and when.
The why remains a mystery — especially why I care enough to check.
It’s a strange itch, a small tether, wispy and intangible, murmuring: I’m not totally gone. I still mattered to you, even if you can’t — or won’t — show up in real life.
They’re still here, taking in my words. Sometimes it’s right after the email sends. Sometimes it’s in the wee hours of the night. Sometimes they return to the same email again and again. I can see when they read my stories or watch my face framed by a podcast screen.
It’s a detached intimacy I never knew could exist. But here I am, feeling it. And there they are, observing me from afar, ever-present in my digital wake.
I bet they all read this one.
One of my former lovers subscribes to me from two email addresses: one for viewing emails, and one — much rarer — for visiting my posts, like he’s sneaking in through a digital side door. Much like him, I don’t check in on his activity every day, but when I do, I look to see how many days he’s checked.
It’s often.
The new year seemed to make him sentimental. I podcasted twice — once on New Year’s Eve, a spontaneous stream from my bedroom while a dozen teenagers partied downstairs, and again on New Year’s Day. They’re both up-close, informal and intimate. I talk about my hopes for the new year.
He watched both of them — three times each, with five of those six views on January 1. Happy new year to him, I guess?
Then there’s the man who burst out of his long-term marriage into my orbit in an amorous fury, all texts and FaceTime calls and stolen kisses and a wildly misguided IKEA run as he set up his post-separation apartment — and then poof, he tossed me off with one dismissive text. Now he opens me the way he dated me — in fits and spurts, swinging from devoted to devoid from one day to the next. He recently opened 17 of my emails in one six-hour binge of my words. Then he went dark for days. In readership, as in dating —he’s a regrettable, inconsistent mess.
This isn’t stalking. It’s just analytics.
Which is somehow worse.
We talk a lot about parasocial relationships as something fans have with celebrities. No one prepared me for the parasocial relationship you can have with a man you’re actually dating — or how much stranger it becomes after he’s gone, when the only remaining intimacy is a “Post seen” status and a date stamp in my Subscribers dashboard.
It doesn’t make me feel seen.
I don’t text these men or call them. I don’t ask why they keep up with me through my work, and I don’t take their distant interest as a sign of actual interest.
And I don’t block them, either.
I just watch as they open me.
These men had a chance at my heart, and a manual to guide them. I wrote it.
If they wanted to know how to love me, all they had to do was listen and read. My stories are public — my fears and hopes and theories archived, my values searchable. They had me in real time every morning on my podcast and then again in essays that stayed put.
A user’s guide. A date-me doc, as the kids might say.
And woven throughout all my stories — through the silly and sexy anecdotes, the heartache, the lament, the joy, all of it — was one simple theme: if you want to win my heart, show up for me.
Did they fail on purpose, I’ve wondered, because they knew how to?
Or did they fail in spite of the explicit guidance?
It doesn’t matter — they’re gone. My nervous system is better off for it.
But here we both are, still checking in: them on my life. And me, to see if they’re still following my life.
Which is weirder?
My summer lover appeared in my podcast chat every morning, his silly handle popping up like a little flag planted in my day. My heart genuinely leapt every time I saw him there. It felt like closeness. It felt like consistency. What it wasn’t was presence.
The imbalance hid in plain sight. My online community recognized him as “my person,” which gave him a sense of legitimacy I never received. I met none of his people. I didn’t know whether anyone around him even knew I existed.
It turns out you can be deeply seen by someone who never lets you see them back.
We broke up over something painfully simple: my need to hear from him each day. Not paragraphs. Not therapy. Just proof of life, evidence that I belonged somewhere in his world. He’d say he understood and that he’d try, but he couldn’t sustain it. It was too much. I was too anxious, he told me.
It wasn’t my anxiety. It was his neglect.
Yet now, months later, there he still is, connecting with me — my thoughts, my feelings, my life in sentences — nearly every day.
The daily presence I requested when we were together is something he offers easily now that it doesn’t require anything from him. Now that I’m no longer a person who might need something in return.
Basil hesitated for a different reason.
“I don’t know if I should date a writer,” he said when we met. “I’m worried I’ll end up in a story.”
“That’s fair,” I said. “I’m basically the GenX Taylor Swift.”
He looked alarmed. “So I get a song?”
“Worse,” I said. “You might get an essay. No glittery bodysuits. No fortune. Same emotional consequences.”
He laughed, but he listened. He took it seriously. So did I. We even talked about what his name would be if he ever became a character. “Basil,” he suggested.
What we were really negotiating in that moment wasn’t branding. It was appetite. He didn’t want to be consumed. I didn’t want to do the consuming, either.
Basil reads my work, yes. But he also lets me inside his life. He sends me a photo of the poster on his wall. He sends me music and tells me why a song matters to him — and he has impeccable taste. He forwards me links to stories that continue our conversations. He doesn’t experience me as a feed. He experiences me as someone he’s in dialogue with.
That’s what makes the difference visible. The dashboard isn’t a measure of desire anymore. It’s a way of seeing, side by side, the difference between being consumed and being met.
So why do I still check it?
Not because I want them back, but because part of my brain still wants coherence. It wants to know whether or not it was real. Whether I registered in some durable way.
We don’t disappear from each other anymore. We leave a digital path, mementos strewn over texts, emails, and social media. Do we delete and block our past loves, or let them haunt our devices? In my case, they’ve become metrics. I don’t just wonder if I mattered. I refresh the dashboard.
GenX dating is a strange space to live inside. It comes braided with grief, late-stage capitalism, and men who were taught to manage feelings instead of inhabit them. Men who know how to consume vulnerability but not how to steward it. Men who can tell you they “see you” without ever letting you into their inner lives.
Meanwhile, women like me narrate ourselves into the world and mistake being witnessed for being partnered.
I’m not mad that they read me. I’m disappointed they thought that counted.
I don’t want to be a feed. I want to be a place, a refuge, a person.
I want a man who doesn’t just know my stories but lets me into theirs. Who doesn’t just listen but invites. Who doesn’t just open me, but holds and makes space for me.
So now I keep my little archive of opens — not as proof of desire or loss, but as evidence of a difference I finally understand: There is being read. And there is being met.https://danaduboiswrites.substack.com/subscribe
And I’m no longer confusing the two.
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Greetings!
I’m Dana DuBois, a GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest with a whole lot of little words to share. I’m the co-host of The Daily Whatever Show and Editorial Director here at Blue Amp Media. I write across a variety of topics but parenting, music and pop culture, relationships, and feminism are my favorites. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.
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