Too much information on February 23, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I was in a relationship for almost a year and it finally ended last week. It has had ups and downs, breakups and reunions so many times that I cannot remember the numbers. I love him very much, but he cannot live with my past (which really isn’t shady at all!). When he was asking me some very personal and unnecessary questions, I lied to him for fear of losing him. The truth came out. For five months, we have been trying to work through this, him accepting my past (three other men) and the fact that I lied to him; I’ve been trying to move on from his insults. Last week, he told me he couldn’t stop thinking about my “mistakes” and he wanted to see other people. I should be happy to be free from the arguments, but I’m not. I love and only want to be with him. I go to a very small school, so his presence and any girl he takes home are always near. I don’t want to sit in or go out anymore on weekends. How can I go out and deal with the fact he’s with other girls, ones who are in the place where I want to be? Breakup Girl, I obviously can’t change the past, but my future seems in peril! I wish he would accept the past and that I love him. Instead, he’s thrown me away like yesterday’s garbage! HELP!

— Discarded and Depressed

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Here, your weekly installment of Ask Lynn, BG’s alter ego’s column at MSN.com (powered by Match.com). This week, we meet “Hope It Works,” who has a serious disability that keeps him from doing certain things … though not from meeting people online. Now, he’s met someone pretty special, but he doesn’t know when or how to give her his full story. On the one hand, he says, it’s a lot to lay on someone you barely know; on the other, of course, he knows it’s something she has to know. What to say without scaring her away? See what Lynn thinks — and then come back here to share your own thoughts!

P.S. A couple more tidbits that touch on love and disability: a letter to BG from Turf Warrior, plus a nice shoutout from JulieFoolie (third item on page).

That guy you’re chatting up online? He could be … that other guy. This just in from the Wall Street Journal:

“Among the 125 million people in the U.S. who visit online dating and social-networking sites are a growing number of dullards who steal personal profiles, life philosophies, evensignature poems. ‘Dude u like copied my whole myspace,’ posts one aggrieved victim. Copycats use the real-life wit of others to create cut-and-paste personas, hoping to land dates or just look clever. Hugh Gallagher, a 36-year-old writer in New York, is one of the copied. Match.com has more than 50 profiles with parts of Mr. Gallagher’s college entrance essay, which he penned nearly two decades ago and later appeared in Harper’s Magazine. ‘I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees’ and ‘I write award-winning operas’ are among Mr. Gallagher’s most popular lines.”

Read the whole piece for some entertaining anecdotes about people getting royally busted — dude, if you say you write award-winning operas, your date is going to ask about them! — or, on an upside, overhauling their profiles after seeing them cut and pasted onto someone else’s page (!) … and realizing they didn’t like what they’d said in the first place.

Yeah, it’s amusing, and there’s even a happy ending. And if it’s a phenomenon, it’s a phenomenon; report away. But still. BG remains weary of the seemingly endless out-churning of “Gotcha!” articles about online dating that, intentionally or not, perpetuate the misapprehension that the people you find on the Internet are probably lying, that they are NOT WHO THEY SAY THEY ARE. (Why, we revisited that chestnut just this week, in a letter from 1997.)

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