Wicked Local Staff Photo by Leise Jones Smyrl.
Susan Walsh, founder of the blog "Hooking Up Smart," at her kitchen table in Brookline, where she often spends her days writing columns and responding to readers' comments.
It started off casual.
Susan Walsh was just a mother trying to guide her teenage daughter in the right romantic direction, lending an ear and offering advice from her own experiences.
But as word spread and her daughter’s friends began seeking her out for pearls of wisdom, it quickly became more than just mother/daughter chitchat.
Now with a widely read blog -- hookingupsmart.com -- Walsh shares research, studies and her own stories with readers from all over the globe.
“Her friends started calling me ‘Aunt Sue’ as a joke, and I had a group of them coming over regularly, trying to pick my brain about what to do… I started this blog so everybody could keep in touch and continue the conversation,” the Brookline woman said.
Walsh said the high school girls were freaked to realize many of their male counterparts were only interested in casual hook-ups.
She said the group of girls grew, as college kids Walsh knew joined the conversation, swapping shocking stories.
“A lot of times a girl would say, ‘He kissed my eyelids,’ or ‘He touched my hair’ -- looking for signs of real emotion and commitment. They came to understand he enjoys cuddling too, and demonstrating affection, but he’s not interested in locking it down,” Walsh said. “I really felt these girls had no idea how to read signals or what was a realistic expectation.”
It was 2008 and Walsh was in the process of re-entering the corporate workforce when she decided to devote herself to the blog, which generates revenue from advertisers.
It had 50 visitors on the first day, as search terms and key words pointed users to the blog.
The biggest search term: “Why don’t I have a boyfriend?”
“It started taking off, and I get around 6,000 unique visitors a day and it’s a very heavily commented site,” she said.
From light-hearted posts to in-depth research, Walsh said she explores all aspects of dating and relationships.
She said there’s a wide audience of both men and women looking for answers or wanting to contribute feedback.
“They’re unsure how to navigate what’s become a complicated script for meeting other people, dating and not dating. There’s very little discussion between men and women and little emotional intimacy before there’s physical intimacy,” she said. “They feel unsure and are bumbling around the sexual marketplace, flying blind, and they crash sometimes.”
With about three or four posts a week, Walsh said she catches some fire from a few readers, like a feminist group that says the sexual double standard shouldn’t exist.
While Walsh agrees it’s unfair, she says men continue to judge women on their pasts.
“You can’t change the way they feel about a woman’s promiscuous history. The reeducation of men has not been successful in all cases, and I don’t think it ever will be. I’m trying to communicate to women that this is what men are looking for. If you do hope to marry -- that’s a life goal of yours -- be aware now of what’s going to be important when you’re 28,” she said.
Walsh said she even dabbles in her own research, and once posed a question to readers, asking how they define femininity.
She narrowed down the six most mentioned responses from men, and fed it back to the female readers.
“The response was so interesting. Some of the women said it really made sense, but they were never taught to be feminine and would like to learn, and other women said if a man wants to be nurtured he should go to his mother, it’s not my job. It was an interesting array of responses,” Walsh said.
She said both men and women pose questions and talk about problems with the other sex: Women complain about mixed signals, while men take umbrage with the way women contradict what they want in a partner.
Walsh said she gets attached to her readers and invested in the topics, which proves useful for followers like Tara Porter.
The 23-year-old Boston woman met Walsh through her college roommate, a family friend of Walsh’s, and has been taking her advice since.
“I will take what she says into consideration with any relationship or personal decision I make with boyfriends or hooking up situations,” Porter said, explaining Walsh just gave her successful advice on a communication issue she had with her boyfriend. “She’ll tell you flat out, and she doesn’t sugarcoat it. It’s nice… and she says, ‘If this is the result you want, this is what you have to do. It’ll work out the way you want it to, or if it doesn’t you don’t want it anyways.’”
Walsh, 55, has been married for 27 years and is now looking at speaking gigs and a possible book deal.
In the meantime, she’s just happy doing what she’s doing .
“I’ve had a career in the past, but I’ve never had so much fun,” she said. “I’ve never done more important work.”
Copyright 2011 Brookline TAB. Some rights reserved
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