ThreeWayAction is closing. I�m sad, because it was a great community, the first online forum where I felt comfortable posting enough for people to get to know me a little bit. There was lots of straightforward sex talk, there were some really funny posts, and quite a few worthwhile discussions and arguments. I met some great people, and didn�t encounter too many nut jobs.

I�m sad, but I feel like the closing is a good idea. 3WA as I knew it is already gone. Most of the old regulars, the ones whose posts made this place clever and interesting, have gone away. I hardly post myself these days because of this odd sense of d�j� vu I get every time I look at the forum. �Didn�t we talk about this last year? Is there really anything more to say on the subject?� So many times I have typed up a reply to someone, only to pause before hitting the Post button, reread my words and realize that I�ve said the exact same thing in the exact same words at least once before. So I don�t post it. I don�t want to be that girl who always repeats herself until everyone is sick to death of talking to her.

I am not Sara Astruc�s mom, and she doesn�t need me to tell her whether her time and talent could be better spent on some other project. She is smart enough to run her own life, and there are far worse things than getting paid to run an online forum. If she is passionate about running a subscription-based forum to carry on the 3WA name, I�ll join up and pay my dues, because she deserves that much support from me. And I�ll hope for the best, that it will be just as good or better than the old 3WA, that a smaller pool of posters won�t stagnate and that a paying group won�t have some sense of entitlement that makes them impossible to moderate.

But I honestly don�t think it�s going to work. I see all the pledges rolling in and I�m sure that everyone is very sincere right now, in the heat of the crisis, but when the bill comes in and it�s �well, I could pay 3WA or I could pay my water bill / buy dog food / go out for drinks tonight�� we�ll see. Some of us donated regularly before, some of us donated at every lesser crisis, but some of us never donated at all, and never will.

3WA as we know it will be dead soon, and I�m sad. But I would rather let it slip away gracefully, with love.