dating while building cuffed | musing no. 51

what happens when she can read every layer of you long before you’ve learned anything real about her.

most people worry about when to tell someone they’re dating a small detail about their life. a hobby. a scar. a preference. something manageable.

i don’t have that luxury.

i built a project that lets people walk straight into my head. they don’t need to know me to know me. they just need a link.

and that’s the part i never anticipated.

now that i’m dating again, i’ve had to confront something i didn’t have language for until recently: cuffed creates an information asymmetry so big it can distort the entire relationship before it even begins. she can read my patterns, my history, my mistakes, my evolution, my grief, my desires. she gets depth before i get context.

that imbalance is uncomfortable in a way most people will never experience.

because i don’t get the same access. she doesn’t have a public record of her heart. she doesn’t have essays about her childhood, her fears, her breakups, or the way she processes intimacy. i don’t get a mirror. i just get her in real time, while she gets the archive of who i’ve been.

it’s vulnerable. and honestly, it’s scary.

i’ve talked to a few women who subscribe to cuffed—women i trust—and they helped me see something clearly: the real question isn’t when to share the project.

it’s how to share it without handing someone the entire map to your insides before they’ve earned that level of access.

with the doctor, i kept it simple. i didn’t hide it. i didn’t turn it into a sales pitch. i just said i was writing. that was the truth. the relationship was still early, so the conversation moved on naturally.

later, when she asked how the writing was going, i had a choice: downplay it to make it feel “safer,” or tell the truth. my first instinct was to minimize it. that instinct was wrong. dishonesty early on doesn’t stay small. it infects everything.

so i told her the truth.

but i didn’t give her the entire library. i chose five pieces that represented a wide range of who i am—my past, my heart, my grief, my growth. not the whole story. just a window into it.

she didn’t get overwhelmed. she didn’t get threatened. she didn’t run. she met it with support, thoughtfulness, curiosity.

and that’s where the ground rules had to become real.

the boundary is this: i will never write about the relationship itself. not the moments. not the private conversations. not the day-to-day. not the “us.”

but i can write about my internal world—what i’m learning, what i’m afraid of, what i’m trying to build differently this time—because that’s mine. my interiority is not the relationship. it’s the part of me that existed long before her and will exist long after.

cuffed is my inner landscape, not our shared one.

that distinction matters.

m.51 is me finally admitting how heavy that balance can feel. the fear of being known too quickly. the risk of imbalance. the responsibility of telling the truth without turning another human being into content they never consented to be.

dating while building something this personal means walking a tightrope: honesty without intrusion, vulnerability without exploitation, openness without overexposure.

not everything should be revealed.

not everything should be hidden.

the balance is the relationship.

— author

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