Back in the day before the Internet, if you were young, you usually found your first love in the neighborhood, in school, or in church. If you were fortunate, your family had a car or you caught a ride and you got to go to the beach or amusement park or other outing like a family picnic or reunion. This was really the first chance to see how other people liked you outside of your normal world.
And if you did spend the day with a new friend and you lived in the hood, there was no chance of keeping up the romance cuz you had no phone and you couldn’t afford stamps to be writing back and forth. So you learned to look at the value of people within your reach. For some that value was finding out who could afford to pay for some sex. For others it was who was the most likely person to stand by you for the rest of your life. But the choices always seemed pretty clear. Unless you went away for college, or got a good job, or went in the military whoever you ended up with, you could be pretty sure that everybody else knew them and their family too.
These were the days when people still sneaked into liquor stores, parked their cars in dark back parking lots late at night to visit the porn shop, and waited til the video store was empty to race into the adult section and get out before the Deacon returned his movies. A lot of people never knew who they were really married to until their mate got caught at something. I guess that is still true to some extent today except the internet leaves evidence forever- long after you got saved and moved to another town.
I had a childhood friend who married a good man and never told him how she used to be. Years before, however, when she was single, her apartment got broken into and her computer was stolen. She said there was nothing on it so she wasn’t worried. The only problem was that she had saved all her passwords on the computer and she didn’t know the thief was using her social media accounts to scam people. She thought she had been hacked at some point and just made new accounts but the thief already had copies of all her pictures and everything. So this scammer randomly hits up and starts a conversation with a cousin of the husband in another town. So he calls up the husband and tells him he think something up with his wife pretending to be in another town and she got nasty pictures and videos on her profile.
The husband takes off from work and drives a half hour to meet his cousin who saved all the conversations, looks at all the pictures and messages and freaks out thinking he made the mistake of his life, goes home and packs up his stuff and leaves a note with the name of his divorce attorney and a link to her active profile that she knew nothing about but had pictures and videos back in her single days when she was sleeping with men to get her bills paid. Yeah it was an old account but what could she say? When we were young there really was no paper trail and unless you pissed somebody off, your secret was safe.
The problem with a lot of us is we don’t understand that ghettofabulous and technology is a one way ticket to messing up your life. When I used to do pre-employment security investigations, I have found old archives of people’s past profiles they would be ashamed to know still exist. There is a scripture that says be sure your sins will find you out. Her problem really wasn’t her past. We all have a past of some kind whether as a victim or participant. People tend to have a conscience about such things, but in this cold new world, the best thing you can do if you call yourself loving somebody is to tell them the truth before the computer tells on you. –Neo Blaqness