Back when it was a more topical thing to discuss, Ordinary Gentleman Matthew Schmitz made the following observation about St. Patrick’s Day:

Being half Irish myself, I think there are many good reasons to celebrate St. Patty’s, not least Ireland’s impressive religious and literary heritage. But I think it is weird that one of the reasons the holiday exists is to give the privileged a chance to dress up in the drag of historical oppression.

There are a couple of issues here. The first, pertaining to St. Patrick’s Day itself, is handled in the comment section. Actually, it really is about the beer, for the most part. Whites are also known to celebrate Cinco De Mayo and non-Christians celebrate Mardi Gras. There’s a party! Why pass it up?

But I think Schmitz brings up another interesting point. There really is the tendency of Americans to celebrate the closest non-British ethnicity that they can. A lot of people claim Irish heritage when it’s really pretty minimal. My friend Silke Modaber, white as white can be on 7/8 of her family, embraced the other 1/8 Lebanese*. Could it be that, though Schmitz is wrong about St. Paddy’s Day that he is right about the need for whites to find some sort of ethnic identity so that they can claim victimhood (or perhaps disclaim oppressorship)?

I’m actually skeptical of that, too. As many point out in the League’s comment section, a number of people that play up their Irish heritage couldn’t even tell you the ways that they were done wrong. I rarely hear anything about Those Bastard Brits or anything of the like. Silke never said anything about the Lebanese done wrong and only very briefly, right in the aftermath of 9/11, expressed any concern that she would have a target on her back because of her indistinguishable, Anglicized last name. No, she liked her Lebanese branch because it was where she got the ability to get a great tan. Beyond that, though, it made her interesting.

That’s something I missed out on. My last name is English. My mother’s last name is German. My grandmothers’ last names are English and English. In this country, there is nothing more dull than that. The only thing I get out of it is a joke (always made when someone points out their Polish or Portuguese or whatever heritage) is a reference to my “oppressing ancestors” or (in more comfortable company) a quip about how my ancestors probably oppressed their ancestors (somewhat unlikely, given that my roots are not particularly high-class). And really, all that is to me is a way to say that when it comes to interesting family history, I got nuthin’. I’m not (insofar as I know) even the cool kind of Anglo-American whose great-times-x grandparents came over on the mayflower.

If I had Irish ancestry, you bet I would play that up. The closest I come is some Scottish in there somewhere. And the German, of course. Germans are not quite as constrained as the English, but they’re not that far behind. German immigration occurred pretty early in the Republic. Besides which, Germany as we now know it is a relatively young country. There’s a lot of interesting there with the Saxons and whatnot, but it’s not something that most people, unless burdened with a very German name or in a heavily German part of the country, as translatable. They were Germanic People and Prussians and Saxons. At least Scandanavians have the Viking imagery. Germans have sausage. And the thing that the German-Germans are best known historically is recent history and is not something people choose to be associated with.

And the Brits. What can you say about the Brits. We’re proud British-Americans, except that of course the afterhyphen people had to go war against the pre-hyphen people a couple times before we got settled and if you embrace the pre-hyphen too much, well, you’re just identifying with the enemy (not that it bothers some southerners in the case of a different war, but I digress). And it wasn’t even an age-old grudge or a grudge we could really hold.

That’s not to say the Brits don’t have an interesting history. They do… but not in a grand sort of way. They were once an awesome power, but they declined to be sufficiently interesting or dramatic to have a real tragic downfall the same way that, say, Rome did. The Brits went, they saw, they conquered, they got beat a few times, and they gave up a few times without even fighting. I guess if I had to choose an old country with which I identify other than the US it’s the Brits. I have an aunt that’s an Anglophile, but I pretty much fail to see the point. We’re not different enough for it to be interesting and if we’re looking at like countries to identify with, I identify with Australia. England is the Dad, Ireland the nutty uncle, and Australia and Canada the siblings. It’s against the rules for Dads to be interesting.

So people gravitate towards those parts of their history that are most interesting. The Irish are, if nothing else, interesting. And the things we identify with Ireland are silly (little men and their rainbow-gold!), goofy (Superstition! Luck!) and fun (Beer!). Few really care about the potatoes.

* – In her defense, the 1/8 is where she got her last name from. Be that as it may, nobody would know it was a Lebanese name unless they were told.

When it comes to social traditions, I am generally a fan of upholding them wherever I can. By “wherever I can” I mean that whenever it doesn’t make considerably more sense not to. The idea being that I am an odd fellow in so many ways that I can’t help that in the ways that I can help I should try to meet society half-way. My wife, despite being the most traditional of the Himmelreich girls, has a little more of a non-traditional outlook.

As a case and point, when we married, she chose to keep her maiden name. I was very unenthusiastic about it at the time, to say the least. There was no point at which it posed a threat to our coming nuptuals, but it was still something of a sore point. The reason behind this was not so much that I needed her to become a Truman or that I wanted to treat her like property or anything like that. It mostly came down to a desire to conform. I find it far more likely than not that I would have changed my last name to hers if I lived in a society where that was common.

Of course, that’s easy for guys to say. I hear guys say that when I am actually very skeptical that they would. It’s easy to talk about what you would do when you know you don’t have to. Most would, I suspect, in the same way that most women change their names. But a lot wouldn’t. The question a lot of guys ask is “What’s the difference between having the name one man (her father) gave her and the name another man (her husband) gave her?” This suggests to me that they don’t understand the issue or at least only understand part of it. It’s not just that she’s taking a man’s name, but it’s that she’s taking a new name after 20-30 years with the previous one.

I don’t think that I appreciated that myself until I got married and my friends started getting married. The logistical problems with changing your name are not very severe but can still be a pain. However, the name change formalizes a change in identity that guys are not asked to undergo. In my wife’s career, there is a formal aspect to this in that all of her licensure is under her previous name. But for others, they’ve built a name for themselves in their careers and communities and amongst their friends and all of those people now have to be informed of who you are.

With all of this in mind, I can understand why a lot of women object to it.

The response to all of this from a lot of guys is, “Yeah, well, I guess I can sort of see how that’s inconvenient, but there’s no obvious solution. A woman keeping her name means that they have no common name between them. Hyphenation is a temporary solution at best. So, since there are no alternatives, we might as well go with the status quo. The problem is that by choosing not to conform, you’re making a statement against conformity. And you’re using our marriage to do it.”

Honestly, this was one of the two biggest humps for me to get over. When she told me that she intended to keep her name, I just had visions of getting caught in the middle. Correcting people that assumed that her last name was the same as mine. Lending my ear to her frustration at people that just assumed that our names were the same or forgot that they weren’t. I expected it to be a serious inconvenience. Incidentally, I expected this not because traditionalists were warning me to try to get me to go the traditional route, but rather by listening to more than a few complaints from women that kept their names about how people are not expecting or accepting their decision. This was just one front of the culture war I wanted no part of.

The second hump was there being no common family name. This was where some concessions were requested and others made, though unfortunately not the same concessions. Clancy volunteered to hyphenate her name because that was where she could meet me halfway. Unfortunately, for me, that’s sort of like my wanting a beard and she wanting me clean shaven* and us agreeing on a moustache as a compromise. Between hyphenation and two names, I am completely and utterly indifferent. Even if her last name incorporates mine, it’s still a different last name and makes a similar “statement” that I am not enthusiastic about making.** My proposed solution was that she go my Himmelreich professionally and Truman personally. From her perspective, though, even if she were being called Himmelreich, not having that last name was not something she was going to be happy about. So I decided to propose the alternative: her legal name and professional name remain Himmelreich (or incorporate it into hyphenation if she wants), but socially she be willing to go by Truman. In other words, no big deal about correction. Likewise, I would not object to being called Will Himmelreich as that would be an alternate name for me.

That was enough to get us by until I discovered that having two different last names actually isn’t that big of a deal. That may change when we have kids, but given the number of times I’m expressly asked if we have the last name, I am thinking not. While a house of two names is not the norm, it’s at least common enough. Particularly amongst doctors. And the whole question about answering machines turned out not to be an issue, either, because we don’t want her last name on our answering machine anyway. Nor do we want her name plastered visible from the sidewalk. We don’t want to invite needy patients calling our family line or visiting our family house. And I’m at the point where I wouldn’t care if our phone messages said Himmelreich-Truman anyway. The whole different-last-names thing has become sufficiently uncontroversial that I remain glad that I did not make it a bigger issue than I did or stand my ground or risk losing the wonderful woman who is among the best things ever to happen to me.

It has become slightly a bigger deal since moving to Arapaho. I have been referred to as a Himmelreich on a couple of occasions and our auto insurance company wasn’t able to handle the two-last-names thing. In the case of Callie, though, it’s a small enough town that it’ll get around. And though it’s not what people out here are expecting (in comparison to Cascadia), nobody has looked at me like I’m one of those kind of people.

I was hoping to eloquently work this last part in to the above prose, but it just didn’t quite fit. So bear with me. The notion that this is a problem without a solution and therefore there are no answers and so somebody loses their name so it might as well be the woman actually isn’t right. There really is a good solution to this: everybody gets a male and female last name. The name we mostly use and carry to the next generation is the name of our gender. The way that this would work is that if Clancy and I have a daughter, she would formally be Lain Lindsey Himmelreich-Truman, but go by the name Lain Himmelreich most of the time. If we had a son named William Edward Himmelreich-Truman, he would go by Eddie Truman. If my daughter married some guy named John Smith, she would lose the Truman, add the Smith, and her children would be Truman-Smith. If Ted married a girl named Jones, he would change his full name Jones-Truman. And this would continue from generation to generation.

The advantage of this situation is that it would allow for legacy names for women. I am the fourth William ______ Truman in my line. But women can’t do that as easily because their names are always subject to change and even if they don’t change their name the daughters will take their father’s name. Unlike common hyphenation, this is sustainable over generations. Each have their name but there is also a collective, family name. It may sound a bit confusing at first, but it’s something that I would expect people to get used to pretty quickly.

So is that something that Clancy and I are going to do? Well no, because it’s one of those things that only works when everybody else does it. I have no desire to be a domestic trailblazer. Further, since nobody else does it, it would invariably lead to assumptions that any daughters I have are stepchildren because while mothers having different last names as their children is not unheard of (due to not changing their name or divorce and remarriage), the same is not true of fathers. Mostly, though, it’s the trailblazer thing and a desire not to use my family to express my dissent from tradition. If I have a daughter that makes the decision to trailblaze by taking her mother’s name (when she turns 18), I won’t object.

* – Actually, she likes me having facial hair more than I do. She doesn’t like it when I shave. The point being, though, that a moustache is not a compromise because it’s more different from clean-shaven than it is from bearded and besideswhich nobody likes moustaches and they look particularly retarded on me.

** – Oh, and our actual last names do not, shall we say, roll off the tongue. Even less so than Himmelreich-Truman.

Obsidian argues that men are generally more expected to “settle” than are women:

Because of evolutionary realities, Women are and have always been the choosier sex. This is understandable-Women only have a limited amount of eggs, a limited amount of time to “make good” on them, and human childbirth is perhaps the most difficult of all the mammals on the planet to pull off successfully. All of this makes sex, even in our time of vastly improved medical science, quite risky for the Female; if she makes the wrong choice of mate and has his kid(s), it can prove disastrous in a whole host of ways. I personally know scores of Men who, upon merely finding out that a Woman has a kid or two, immediately drops her from contention, not only as a date, but even as a pump and dump. They don’t want to be bothered, and in our age of “Maury Baby Mama/Baby Daddy” high drama, I can’t say that I blame them. Of course, there are also scores of Men out there who can and will screw just about everything in sight, and that’s kind of the point of this post today.

It’s an interesting theory, but one that I believe has two major vulnerabilities.

First, it’s easy and understandable for men to talk about how choosy women are because we are the ones that get rejected by them. They do the rejecting. We ask out. We seek to mate while they spend a good portion of their time shooting down men that seek to mate. Or that’s one way of looking at it, anyway. But men don’t spend much time rejecting women because we almost never have to. If we’re not attracted to a woman, all we have to do is refrain from asking her out! We ask out a very small percentage of the women that we know, so in a way we’re defacto rejecting the vast majority of women out there.

I’m not saying that it’s fair that we are expected to ask women out or that women must to some degree rely on men asking women out, but it’s still the most common practice. One of the upshots for men is that it allows us to reject women without rejecting them. It allows us to evade our own standards. It’s easier to believe that you have an extremely open mind when girls you’re uninterested in are background furniture.

The second problem is that we’re choosy when it comes to… what, precisely? Sex? As Obsidian points out, we’re notoriously unchoosy in that department. But when it comes to a monogamous relationship, marriage, and other forms of commitment, guys have something of a different reputation. When guys angle for sex but put off any sort of commitment, we are being choosy in our own way. We are being selective about who we give our monogamous devotion to. A guy that’s sleeping with a girl on a regular basis but refuses to commit to them is not necessarily being any less choosy. Can a woman who hedges on sex or romantic commitment even while she’s getting exactly what she wants from the guy (emotional validation, bug-smashing willingness, etc) make the claim that she’s not being choosy because she’s spending time and giving attention to a guy that is not exactly her ideal? It’s the same sort of thing.

Whether men are more picky than women or vice-versa is extremely difficult to gauge. Not coincidentally, both sides believe that it’s the other side gumming up with works with their unrealistic standards. As is often the case, the truth falls somewhere in between. It’s unlikely that each side is exactly the same degree of choosy in the aggregate, but it’s also the case that there is such wide variation within each gender that it’s problematic to paint with a very wide brush at all.

-{Link from In Mala Fide}-

A while back I wrote on the subject of height differences and the effect that has on romantic success. The long and short of it is that tall women believe that they are discriminated against because guys are intimidated. Guys argue that tall women are disadvantaged because they cull their dating pool to only include guys that are taller than they. I took the position that there is probably some merit to both, but that the bigger issue is that women want guys taller than they are (or at least roughly the same height) and therefore the fewer guys taller than they are, the fewer options they will consider.

The discussion was launched on an article from The Frisky. Well, another article from The Frisky and a poll suggest that the guys are more right than wrong. They took a poll and nearly three out of four respondents said that they would only date a guy taller, the same height, or only slightly shorter than they are.

The only caveat to this is that if you polled only tall women, you might get different results. It’s easy for 5’5″ women to say that they will only date taller guys than them because they’re only excluding pretty short guys. I don’t know how long a 6’1″ woman has to go lonely before deciding that there are more important factors in height, but I doubt it’s an indefinite drought. On the other hand, a 6’1″ woman is more likely to be self-conscious about her height than a 5’5″ woman and so height may be a bigger deal.

Either way, three out of four is a much higher number than I would have expected on a self-reporting survey. At the least, I would have guessed that more women did it either subconsciously or would deny it even in an anonymous poll. We have to accept the poll, though, because Internet polls are always accurate.

A while back, Rob made a comment about dating fat girls. It was his perspective that it was a dangerous proposition because if they lose their weight, they would dump you flat.

Back when I was working at Mindstorm, there was a young woman that was a receptionist for a time. She was a bit pudgy, but she knew what to do with the pudge to minimize its impact and make it work for her in her own way. The consensus among the single guys I knew there was that she was cool and cute but they didn’t know if they would actually date her.

It was apparent that she put more than a little effort in her appearance. It was no accident that she found clothes that minimized her weight and she found a style that very much worked for her. It was probably not lost on her that she was a receptionist in a building 85% staffed by guys, some of whom made pretty good money and who were members of a group known for being less particular.

I think of the receptionist because she was what struck me as a romantic marketeer. She was out there to get the absolute best guy that she could get by whatever criteria she used.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We all do that in our own way. If Clancy had met someone with all of my strengths but minus a few weaknesses who was just as into her as I was, there’s a good chance that she would have picked him. And vice-versa. I say “a good chance” because at some point I do think that chemistry takes a role.

But there is a group of people that takes it to the next level in a particularly cutthroat sort of way. The kind of person that, if they lost weight, would not hesitate in the slightest going for an upgrade.

Sheila talked of guys that are like this. Whereas guys that can’t afford to be too particular like to say that they would make better boyfriends to attractive girls because they will be more grateful to have an attractive girl, sometimes that’s just not true. Once they achieve one level, the next level up seems within grasp.

And the same is true of many women, including the receptionist. It was hard not to notice the extraordinary attention that she would lavish on what could easily be perceived as higher-status guys. Guys that were pretty much out of her league. But she would still entertain guys that were less desirable. I couldn’t escape the sense, though, that if she were ever with the latter and got an opportunity for the former, that she’d jump ship at the opportunity.

I could be wrong, though. It’s possible that she was just indulging the guys that I would put in her station and would never go out with them because she has what I would consider to be excessively high standards.

It’s hard to pick the marketeers out from the rest. Because people don’t let their own insufficiencies in the romantic marketplace keep them out of the game. Even ugly people would prefer not date ugly people. It’s something that ideally people move beyond. But a lot don’t. And when it comes to people that were in the lower circles of 6-12, there is a certain void in their self-esteem to fill. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the worst marketeers I know are people that were late entrants into the dating arena.

According Amanda Hess, it seems as though the pot legalization movement is somewhat less than respectful of women.

I think that this is part and parcel of what I might call The Barry Cooper Problem. On the subject of Age of Consent Laws, it might be called The Gannon Problem. That is to say that the people that are often most enthusiastic about pushing back the government to grant us more freedom want it not out of some ideological conviction but rather because the government is just standing between them and what they want. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this except that people that actually want to smoke copious amounts of pot or sleep with young women are not the most appealing advocates for their cause. Or rather, people that want to do these sorts of things and feel the need to make it a part of their public identity are often people that are disrespectful of a wider array of cultural and social expectations. In other words, they can be as annoying as hell and they can make people want to take the opposite position just to spite them.

As Udolpho put it:

I used to be in favor of legalizing marijuana, but the persistent stupidity of marijuana zealots has beaten that position out of me, and now I am against legalization just to spite them. Experience shows that even occasional marijuana smokers are not terribly bright, and it is my belief that stupid people need to suffer. Taking away their pharmaceutical pacifiers is a good start.

On my Barry Cooper post, Last Home Barry commented that a lot of the legalizers are mostly just anti-authority and pot is an expression of that. Take it a step further, and a whole lot of it comes down to a deal of resentment of being told what to do and frustration that society sometimes requests that they check their id at the door. Smoking pot and objectifying women are both expressions of society telling people to behave. Those that object most loudly to corrupt authority, unjust laws, and regressive customs also tend to object to earnest authority, just laws, and reasonable customs when it suits them.

I ran across this image attached to a rather vitriolic post (the thrust of which was, in essence, “only stupid inbred hicks oppose gay marriage and this map proves it”), but it struck something of a thought process. Here goes.

First of all, the map’s not entirely accurate with respect to what the author was trying to say. Five states, at least, shouldn’t be listed as “allowing” cousin marriage, since their restrictions make it so that an impossibly small portion of their population will realistically participate. There’s a considerable overlap with gay and cousin marriage allowability in the northeastern section of the US. And of course the Granola State on the west coast, a place which carries almost entirely the opposite of the “inbred hick” stereotype, allows cousin marriage and has gone back and forth on the issue of gay marriage for a few years now.

Secondly, the science against cousin marriage is muddled. The usual argument put against it is that it encourages genetic diseases. In certain populations, specifically populations where cousin marriage is encouraged and founder effects come into play, this is true. Small, isolated rural villages of current/past ages, the inbred lines of European royalty, and the lines of fundamentalist Mormonism come to mind here. Another example is the Dutch settlers to South Africa (the “Afrikaners”), who carry magnified risk of Huntington’s Disease because an abnormal percentage of the original settlers were carriers.

On the other hand, research into larger, more diverse genetic populations indicates that “once in a while” cousin marriage carries relatively small risk – about the same risk as a woman having kids at the age of 40 rather than 30. The further argument is that laws against it in the US were motivated not by risk of genetic disease, but by a desire to force immigrants to intermarry into the population (and thus assimilate) in a quicker manner.

Oddly enough, the argument about “inbred hicks” falls apart when comparing the map of European gay marriage laws. I’d put a map up comparing it to European laws about cousin marriage, but there’s no real point to it: cousin marriage is legal in 100% of Europe. Two countries have recently begun discussing the option of banning it, and oddly enough, it’s not even the condition of their oddly buckteethed/colorblind/hemophiliac (that last being the origin of the term “blue-blood” as a reference to royalty) royal lines that did it, but rather the high rate of genetic diseases in recent immigrant populations from the rural sectors of Islamic countries, who perpetuate societal cousin marriage rates of 55% or above in a population where it’s not uncommon to be the child of a chain of 8-10 cousin marriages (including “double cousin” marriages, wherein the kids are not simply cousins but where mother/aunt and father/uncle, or mother/uncle and father/aunt, constitute sibling pairs as well making the kids almost genetic siblings) in a row.

The trouble with this is discussion that it’s a perfect example of a “where do we draw the line” sort of argument. On the one hand, in a (mostly healthy) genetic population where cousin marriage would be rare and genetic diversity a given, arguers against cousin marriage would quickly expire upon the line of “well why do we let 40-year-old women have kids then?” On the other hand, we have definitive proof of the genetic risks of allowing multigenerational cousin marriage. There even comes the risk that at some point, society could start stopping non-sibling people from marrying because they both carried a recessive gene for some debilitating genetic disease like Huntington’s or Tay-Sachs, or even something as merely inconvenient as Celiac. It’s not that farfetched; some states to this day still require a blood test, a holdover from times when they were screening for sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis. Another justification (now that the technology exists) for genetic testing as a marriage requirement could be to ensure that they aren’t unknowingly marrying their half-sibling or even full sibling, due to the high percentage of absentee/unknown fathers or potential for siblings to be separated too early in life to remember each other in certain populations.

Slate’s advice columnist, Dear (p)Rudence, has been doing “web chats” for a while along with the regular letters column. I have yet to actually bother to connect to one in real time, but the transcripts provided are usually pretty entertaining, and evidence that Ol’ Rudie (at least the current one) doesn’t quite have a good handle on what’s rude or not when it comes to politeness advice.

My bone of contention comes in with her advice regarding someone who continually gives the “gift” to someone of a donation to charity in their name.

D.C. Metro: I have a family member who sends a gift of some animal to the Heifer fund as a Christmas present to us every year. Every year I get more and more offended, as this is not a “gift” to anyone except themselves, as they get a tax deduction. My kids understand about giving to charity, but I cannot explain how this is a “gift” to us. I would like to tell this person to please stop sending these donations as “gifts” and only a card is fine.

[Ol’ Rudie]: What a good lesson for the kids! A family member makes a contribution in your family’s name to a wonderful cause, and you want your children to understand this isn’t really a gift but a tax deduction, and you want to demand a refund from the giver…

My first objection, however minor, is that Ol’ Rudence immediately misconstrues the position of the writer. They aren’t asking for a “refund”, simply that the giver refrain from such a “gift.” They aren’t even asking for a gift of any sort – a simple greeting card would suffice, as they write.

When challenged, Rudence responds with an even snarkier attack:

[Ol’ Rudie]: Clarksville, I hope everyone on your list knows you’d rather get a puce scarf from the sale rack than a donation to a worthy cause in your name.

The larger problem I have with this idea is that “giving to charity in someone’s name” is a rather smug, self-serving gift. When done unbidden, the social message it sends could well be that the “giftee” is a person who wouldn’t think to give to charity on their own and thus, the “gift” from the “giver” is making up for their moral shortfall. Or the social message, depending on choice of charity, is “I gave to them, you should be giving too.”

The little cards saying “Hey, I gave $XX to Charity Y in your name” have all the social tact of a card saying “Merry Christmas! By the way, if you didn’t donate to Charity Y you’re a terrible person, but don’t worry, I got you covered.”

Now this isn’t always the case. If there is an adult who has a specific connection to a charity, or has requested that people give in their name for instance, it’s probably fine. For example, a monetary donation to a local soup kitchen where your friend or family member regularly volunteers would probably be a wonderful thing, or a donation to an animal shelter or Humane Society/SPCA for an animal lover who has expressed a desire to support those organizations (and might not have financial wherewithal to make a donation of their own), would probably be taken as a truly thoughtful gift.

On the other hand, to do it to a kid? First of all, most children (the younger, the worse in this regard) do not have the mental ability to make that kind of connection. The abstract “I gave to someone in your name”, in a kid’s mind, is going to degenerate into “I gave your gift to somebody else.” Second of all, making the choice of which charity to give to yourself, rather than giving the “giftee” that option, adds the pressure of socially trying to force the person into some public acknowledgement of the “goodness” of the charity. While the charity in question may indeed be noble, people have a tendency to rebel against such a pressure.

Especially in the case of a kid, there are many better ways to handle such a thing. You want it to be as direct as possible. If you’re going to give to an animal shelter, take the kid to an animal shelter, have them make the donation in person, and maybe volunteer some of your time helping to clean up or exercise/feed the animals. If you’re going to give to a childrens’ hospital, have the kid visit some of the sick kids there (like in the cancer ward) and make some new friends to write letters or email to. If you’re giving long-range? Well, bite the bullet and send a real gift, at least until the kid’s reached the age of 10, and then ask them what kind of a charity they’d like to give to.

In an update on the story of Clint and Margaret, the breakup went surprisingly smoothly. After I left and Margaret returned, she announced that he needed to find a new place to stay while they try to repair things. He stayed in an extended stay motel for a couple weeks and then landed into a really sweet in-law suite in the suburbs of Shaston. Predictably, it did not take long for him to be more officially partnered up with Kirby.

There are a few aspects of this uncoupling worthy of discussion, but today I am going to focus on a romantic partner as an individual and a romantic partner as an office.

Clint stopped by and picked up the remainder of his stuff from their old apartment the other day. He couldn’t help but notice an engagement ring on her left hand. It wasn’t just an engagement ring, but it was the exact one that she had been needling him to buy her. Further, as he looked around the apartment, he couldn’t help but notice how much everything was the same. Where his XBox used to be, the new guy’s was. Where his Playstation was, the new guy’s was. Where pictures of Margaret and Clint used to be were pictures of Margaret and the new guy.

The fact that there was a new guy was not a surprise. Shortly after they part ways and it became bleedingly apparent that reconciliation was not going to happen, she met some dude online who was living in, of all places, Delosa. He was a military man whose contract with the government was set to expire and who was already interested in relocating to Shaston, where he was raised. Notably, they’ve met maybe a half-dozen times.

That some guy picked up right where Clint left off is really unsurprising. What became apparent in the latter days of their relationship was how much Margaret wanted Clint to be someone that he wasn’t. It’s not that she didn’t love Clint, but she was just as infatuated with the idea of finding that person and having the romantic proposal and playing house with the adult life and all of that.

It’s not entirely correct that she would have taken anybody to fill that roll, but it is correct to say that the willingness and ability to play that roll (a role which Clint was, in the end, ill-suited for) was perhaps the most important thing a guy had to offer. She barely knows the guy, but then again I’m not sure the degree to which she has to.

It’s not all that unlike how after my breakup with Julianne, she was living with Tony within three months. Tony had a vacancy in his life, a wife that he had been forced to leave. She had a vacancy in hers, a Trumwill that had left her. And unlike me, Tony was willing to take things to the next level of cohabitation. It was a perfect (unmarried) marriage of convenience. It took Tony four years to realize that she was a person playing a part and that, no, that really wasn’t enough for him. It was enough for her until the very end, though.

It’s impossible to say whether Margaret and her new guy will work out. But it’s part of a real phenomenon that I’ve noticed as I get older. Everybody wants that great, special person in theory. In practice, though, people often gravitate towards finding someone willing to meet certain benchmarks and then will fall in love with them. That’s what I mean by “love as an office”. It’s sort of a professional relationship.

Maybe for a lot of people, that’s the best kind. There’s certainly something to be said for settling with someone that shares your values and priorities over someone that doesn’t but makes your heart flutter. And as I’ve come to realize that I’m just not like most people, maybe my own neurotic and existential needs simply don’t apply to the people that really don’t spend all that much time thinking about things.

When I look back at my time with Julie, I still see her as the perfect candidate for the job that I was looking to bring her on for. The loving, devoted wife. Pretty in a wifely sort of way. Willing to indulge my interests and willing to bend to my preferences whenever she could. But that wasn’t enough for me. One of the hardest things I had to learn was that there needed to me something – something – more. I still can’t entirely define what.

Of course, on the other end of the spectrum was Evangeline who had that something but who was extraordinarily ill-fitted to be my partner in the respectable family I was looking to start.

Things often have a way of working out in the end. I found Clancy, who is both a well-suited partner and someone that has that ethereal quality that Julie lacked. Evangeline found a guy that was happy to live the sort of life beyond the guard rails where I was never comfortable. I don’t know if Clint and Kirby are going to work out, but I’ve spent time with her and like her a great deal. If Clint is consigned to a life of debt and relative squalor but also a life on his own terms, he could do a lot worse than her. The jury is still out on Margaret, but her new guy seems to offer her the sort of life that she wants. Julie and Tony… well not everything works out for everyone.

What do you guys think? Do you think that these sort of vacancy marriages can work? Where you just find someone with whom you are compatible and disregard everything else? Or do you see relationships like Margaret and The Officer as being a sort of rebound thing that is inherently weak and due to rupture unless it turns out that they really just correctly determined that they were perfect for one another within a few months and a couple visits?

As mentioned before, the Indianapolis Colts choked up a game trying to keep their players healthy for the playoffs. Most commentators are upset about it, though some have defended it. My father-in-law chalks it up to strategy that makes sense given the rules of the game, namely because having accomplished home-field advantage nothing matters until the playoffs. Others say that it was a bad move because the hit their morale takes (not just losing a game, but losing one that they could win) makes it less rather than more likely that they will win the Superbowl.

I think most of these people miss the point. DamnYankee, a commenter on Ta-Nahisi Coates’s blog, gets it:

The issue is not whether this makes it more likely or less likely that they win the Super Bowl, but rather that things other than playoffs should matter!. That some people can even say that taking a loss makes perfect sense because it doesn’t affect their playoff standings is symptomatic of the problems that playoff-obsession cause.

This isn’t an argument before or against playoffs in general. Rather, it’s that there ought to be different avenues of success. This can be accomplished within a playoff structure. Unfortunately, it’s often the case that playoff systems take on a life of their own and other goals, like division titles and victories over rivals, begin to matter less.

Whatever my criticisms of the NFL playoff model, going undefeated remains a victory apart from Super Bowl victories. This should be preserved. The Indianapolis Colts (or more preciisely, their coach) should be shamed for what they did. I hope that the morale hit they took takes all of the wind out of their season and they lose in the first or second round of the playoffs.

(I just hope they don’t lose in favor of an 8-8 Super Bowl Champion)