At “Free Money Finance”, a blogger offers up regular shots of “tips on how to save money”, but also has collected a “top 10” list of the advice that was absolutely reviled by readers. Like any list, it’s subjective, but I feel the need to take a few of these apart myself:

10. Be healthy — Let’s face it, people don’t like being told they are fat and lazy. I think that’s at the core of the disdain for a healthy lifestyle – Here at HC, we regularly go rounds on why it is people live unhealthy lifestyles. In truth, the supposed “ultra healthy” types (bodybuilders, gym rats, etc) kind of weird me out too. If anything, those people are a portion of the problem with getting people to exercise – I found it a lot harder to go to certain “upscale” exercise chains that are regularly full of gym rats, than I did during my time with a YMCA membership where (for the most part and with only a few outlying exceptions) the people exercising looked a lot more normal.

9. Move to a foreign country (or even visit for health care) – as they admit, this one is probably best for retired folks, since otherwise finding a job is a prerequisite (oh, and did we mention the language barrier’s going to make that extra difficult as well?). That being said, the suggestions of “cheaper” areas to live reminded me of why nobody in their right mind should live there (especially Mexico, which is due for a violent revolution any time now even if you don’t consider the current constant war between police and drug-running gangs to be one already).

7. Buying used — Let’s list the things people hate about buying used: 1) it’s not new; 2) someone else has used it; 3) did I mention it’s not new? – 4) you don’t always know what you’re getting, 5) it’s out of warranty. Yes, I know things go out of warranty on their own anyways, and many warranties are of the “not worth the paper they’re printed on” variety. Yes, I speak as someone who usually extols the virtues of either buying used, or knowing how to repair your own gear. That, however, is just it: I know how to evaluate something if I’m buying used. I know how to get the most out of it and do the repairs myself. For people without that knowledge/skillset, buying used may not be the brightest of concepts, since they may wind up with useless junk sitting around and just going off to buy more used junk. The blogger goes on to list that “most of us have generally accepted that a good-condition used car is less expensive than a new car” – and again, horror stories of people who bought used-car lemons abound.

2. Not buying a pet – even the blogger admits this may be bad advice. Yes, pets can add up as an expense. On the other hand, they’re cheap entertainment, they’re good for raising kids and teaching them responsibility (not to mention strengthening immune systems), they’re good for keeping your blood pressure under control, and they keep your feet warm on cold nights.

1. Moving to a lower cost-of-living city — This one really puzzles me. Not only is it that people don’t like this idea, but they REALLY don’t like it. As in “you’re the stupidest financial blogger ever” sort of don’t like it. But what do I care? I still have my day job. 😉 – I’ll say it: “you’re the stupidest financial blogger ever.” People move for a variety of reasons, but unless you have 6 different job offers in 6 different cities, there are pretty much three general criteria people follow when picking a location: #1, proximity to job. #2, proximity to family (whether you pick “real close”, “kinda close”, or “other side of planet” is your call, but everyone wants it somewhere on that spectrum for their comfort zone), #3 Everything Else. This one is reviled because, quite plainly, it comes across as sanctimonious nonsense. If you’re independently wealthy? Go nuts. If your “job” is something that can be done anywhere you can get your hands on an internet connection? Maybe. If you’re like most (employed) people, however, you’re tied to your job, and the idea of “I’m gonna move out of my house/apartment, load everything into a moving van, and haul ass to somewhere unknown and hope I can find a job there to live cheaper even though the reason that things are ‘cheaper’ there is that all the jobs in the area pay peanuts” is… well… read it again. THAT is what this “advice” amounts to, and why people peg it for the terrible advice it is.

The notion that all men are created equal and that results are determined by effort, discipline, and so on is what my former boss Willard referred to as “one of the great noble myths.” The subject came up shortly after two of my coworkers, Edgar Braughton and Charlie Belcher, were let go. While I had, up until that point, always known that raw intelligence varied from one individual to the next, and that there were people we euphemistically called mentally handicapped that biologically lacked the intelligence that most people have, I never fully appreciated the wide spectrum of intelligence out there until I met, worked with, had to checked the work of, and eventually had to team-lead Edgar and Charlie.

Edgar and Charlie were not mentally retarded in the obvious sense. There were some questions about Edgar, but a lot of those were attributable to a speech impediment on his part that gave the false sense of retardation. Willard, too, had a speech impediment, but is among the smartest of the guys that I know. Edgar could easily have been in that category if he were, well, less dim. But he was the dimmest bulb in our shop. Charlie was a little bit smarter, though not much.

Edgar’s and Charlie’s job was really what I would call straight-forward. For much of the teach, it was mundane. Tedious. Perhaps the hardest part of the job was staying interested in the job enough to do it right. It required an attention to detail, though as Freddie demonstrated you could get away with a lot of inattention if you were simply fast. So really, all you needed was some combination of careless speed or slightly more time-consuming accuracy.

Most of the OSI Team did not have a whole lot in the way of external motivation. I was one of only four longish-term OSI Programmers that was married or in a committed relationship though the only one without children. Simon had kids to support but they were his girlfriend’s kids and he was not under any legal obligation to support them. The other two married OSI Programmers were Edgar and Charlie. On top of that, Edgar had a whopping four kids with a wife that didn’t work and Charlie had a chronically ill wife whose medical bills (by his own telling of it) were considerable. Further, they had less in the way of marketable skills than did many of us and therefore needed the job at Falstaff more than the rest of us did. In other words, these were two people that had the most motivation out of any of us.

And yet, despite all of this motivation, they simply could not get the job done. They could not get it done quickly. They could not get it done right. We tried vigorously to teach them how to do it. We patiently worked with them and looked over their shoulder and tried over and over again to teach them. They had the background that suggested that it wasn’t beyond their grasp. Edgar had a couple years of coursework from DeVry and Charlie a degree from the local vocational school. So it wasn’t completely alien to them. Charlie had a bit of an attitude problem, but his problems far surpassed that.

At the end of the day, despite each of their motivations and despite the easy nature of the job, it was simply beyond their grasp to do it right. Though I had always known of variable intelligence, it just never fully occurred to me that something as simple as that job would quite plainly be beyond people that were able to otherwise live independently. We may squish and squeak and slide a bit and say that they didn’t have the right kind of intelligence. There may be some truth to that in that I could see (maybe, possibly) Charlie being successful at fixing cars or something else that melded one’s mind with one’s hands. But the job itself is so easy to achieve basic competence with that it seemed to me and others that even if your real skills lay elsewhere, it’s not something that somebody shouldn’t be able to at least do right. It’s not an easy job to excel at… but to do? There isn’t a reader of Hit Coffee that couldn’t figure it out in a week.

Of course, Hit Coffee has a self-selected audience. It primarily appeals to people of a pretty basic level of intelligence. To people that like to think about things. People with college degrees (which I think all of you that I know about have) or at least the intelligence to get one. And some of my surprise at what should have been bloody obvious is that I have for most of my life been surrounded by such people. I went to an upper-crest high school. Then I went to college and hung out with the Honors College crowd. My career is mind-based. And even those I knew from outside my circles tended to be self-selected. The people I knew that went to more working-class schools tended to be the smarter people there (I met many of them through a computer network). The warehouse workers at my first job that I talked to tended to be team leads and the odd young man or two that were simply working their way through college. In that sense, it’s no surprise that my relatively sheltered existence lead to a sanguine view of the strength of human intelligence.

And so I gradually had to accede the notion that even within functioning individuals that don’t require special care and that didn’t ride the short bus and weren’t ill-educated and that weren’t just lazy, there can be some pretty basic limits as to what they are capable of. These limits include things that I would have been capable of doing in the seventh grade. Maybe earlier.

A lot of people come to this realization. Some wash it away with notions that it was really how people like Edgar and Charlie were raised and educated that are the problem. That’s historically what I’d done. Even though there were always people that couldn’t do things that I considered pretty basic and that in some cases it might take more attention and tutoring, that they could get there. A lot of whether someone accepts it or declines to accept it depends on ideology. To the extent that it dovetails with what they already believe about people (that, say, poor people are poor because they’re less intelligent), they believe it more readily than others where it presents some uncomfortable truths that contradict the way that they see the world.

For some people, it adds a stronger element of libertarianism because it adds more a sense of justice to the segregation of the haves and have-nots. For me it does slightly the opposite. If people that are at the bottom of the economic latter are so because they made less of an effort or made poorer life choices, I have far less sympathy than someone that is stuck manning a convenience store with little hopes of making it into management simply because they were born with fewer neurons firing quite as vigorously as the next guy. In fact, it almost starts to make a socialist out of me in that I believe that people that lack brain-power (assuming that they work somewhere doing something!) are deserving of, if not everything that their sharper peers that contribute more to society, as respectable a standard of living as we can afford. In short, it makes the notion of wealth redistribution bother me less. It makes the wheat-and-chaff of capitalism overall less appealing.

On the other hand, my experiences at Belle Rieve, that occurred at the same time, which come to think of it included a number of people that probably wouldn’t have been able to do OSI programming work, counteracted this somewhat by demonstrating pretty clearly the dangers of subsidizing lifestyles that aren’t going anywhere. It may be too much to expect them to get jobs that pay well, but it’s pretty important that they work. If idle minds are the Devil’s Workshop, idle lives partake in a never-ending buffet of counterproductive habits. Further, on the subject of crime-prevention, if people that live among the poor are not just limited to those that made poor lifestyle choices, trying to keep those zones as free as possible from crime becomes all the more important.

But mostly, it gives me a little more sympathy for those that haven’t made it. Not enough sympathy that I want to move back to Belle Rieve or that I would raise children where we lived in Estacado or where we live now, but enough to feel a sense of sympathy rather than simply frustration when I bump into them on a daily basis.

-{Note: The setting of most of this post is Deseret, where 90% of the population is white (96% including white-Hispanic). The racial aspects of IQ are discussed at length elsewhere and I would prefer them not be discussed here. This post is about IQ. Not about IQ and race. Not IQ and immigration. Or welfare mommas. Or about how people that are not like you or don’t think like you are ruining our country.}-

Jonah Lehrer writes:

[The] virtue of experiences is that, while material things get diminished over time (we habituate to the pleasure, and then have to deal with the inevitable repairs), pleasant memories tend to become more pleasant. We forget about the delayed flights and jet lag but remember the lush rainforest hike, or the fancy meal in Paris. The vacation might be long gone but it’s still making us happy.

ED Kain isn’t convinced:

I know some people who continually spend money going out to eat, yet never bother to purchase new appliances. Sometimes spending money creating great memories can make it that much more difficult for you to save up for a new car or a down-payment on a house. I’d say that when buying memories becomes more like buying things the two become basically indistinguishable. Beyond that, most people can’t afford really lavish trips, so the same problem of comparison let-down can occur with memories too.

“Going out to eat” is, for the sake of this discussion, an example of spending money on experiences and memories rather than “things”.

A part of me wants to dismiss the “things vs. experiences” discussion as anti-materialist snobbery. Basically a bunch of rich people that want to be able to justify their trips to Tuscany while being able to condemn another guy for buying a 4×4. But they’ve got some research to back up the notion that things don’t make us happy for as long as we expect. I do think, though, that it’s overly-simplistic to suggest that one is inherently better than the other.

For one thing, the marginal utility on each depreciates at a relatively rapid clip past a certain point. Clancy and I spent a lot of money on “experiences” when we went out to eat on a regular basis in Estacado and Deseret. The result? Larger waistlines and thinner bank accounts. Memories? Sure. We do long for some of the restaurants that Soundview seems to conspicuously lack. But since moving out here, going out to eat is an irregular occurrence and because of that is much more significant.

To take a more expensive example, my parents love to go on cruises. They go on two or three a year these days. The last cruise I went on was about a decade ago. I’d like to go on another one at some point. When we do, I expect that it we will get a lot more mileage out of it than my parents do from any similar venture. This despite the fact that they (or Mom, mostly) enjoy cruises on the whole more than I do.

In other words, as ED is sort of getting at, there reaches a point where experiences become a thing. Once it becomes a part of your regular lifestyle, the spending of money on it sort of becomes like renting a car on a regular basis instead of just buying one. You may be renting different cars on different occasions and enjoying the variety a little more than someone stuck with the same car for ten years, but in the end if you reach a financial hiccup and have to go without its absence becomes no less real than if you own a car and it breaks down. It’s less an experience and more an obligation. Each successive new car becomes less special. Some day I would love to rent a muscle car just for the heck of it. But if I viewed doing so as buying a memory and wanted to do it frequently, it’d become more a thing or not.

Now, when it comes to buying experiences and memories, one way you can compensate this is by doing different things and going to different places. For instance, instead of going on a cruise to the Caribbean you go to the Mediterranean or Alaska. Instead of going on a cruise you go rock-climbing. Of course, on the material side of things, you can compensate by buying different things as well. Instead of getting that new computer when your old is good enough, you can get a portable MP3 player.

I will be the first to admit that a lot of the stuff I buy doesn’t buy me happiness. But there have definitely been some things – new and different things – that have enriched my life in significant ways. My first Pocket PC made a border-line unbearable job much more bearable and made chores like waiting in line or going shopping. It was definitely worth eating out ten times or so. It was even worth a flight home to visit the folks.

Saying that there should be a balance is all true and good but some will still suggest that people don’t have this balance and instead veer way too much to the “stuff” side. I think that this is true in some cases, but as EDK points out, we spend a lot on otherwise, too. Until we moved here, I think we went far too much on the spending-on-experiences (or ethereal convenience) and not enough on stuff. Or else, we spent too much on both.

I can certainly agree with the notion that there is more to life than stuff. And it’s true that experiences are one of those things that that is more important than stuff. And some people don’t spend enough on experiences. But others don’t. And I would be wary about broad proclamations about how people should make these decisions.

I have a hypothetical scenario and would be interested in your thoughts.

Imagine that a company creates something that they call the Antcar. The Antcar is a self-driving car where you basically put a destination into a GPS device and it will drive you there. By and large, it is not meant to be driven. There may be controls (like a steering wheel and breaks) for an emergency, but it’s all pretty limited. The entire point is that it will take you where you want to go.

The first question is… would you want such a car? Would you trade the ability to drive for the ability to do other things while the car drives itself? Would you pay $12,000 more for the privilege? $8,000?

The second question, though, is the real question. Let’s say the Antcar (and its competitors) work very well. They’ve been on the market for a while and now the premium is down to $8,000 per car. The initial hopes that it would cut down on automobile accidents was premature. They don’t always play well with human drivers. The Antcar manufacturers, meanwhile, start a pilot program in an eastern European city and then a few cities where Drivercars are banned and only Antcars are allowed on their roads. The results are astonishing in terms of safety improvements. Traffic engineers in the United States start proposing that the US consider doing the same.

Below are some factors to consider. Feel free to point off if I am way off-base about something, but for the sake of this hypothetical accept what I say as true. I’m less interested in how you think Antcars would really work and more interested in how you would evaluate the tradeoffs.

Pro: Safety! Car-against-car accidents reduce by 90%. Cars running off the road reduce by 98%. Pedestrian accidents reduce by only about 10%, but the victims of remaining accidents are caused by pedestrian error. Accidents where pedestrians follow the correct traffic signals are reduced by 98% (the remaining 2% are Antcar malfunctions). No drive drivers, no exhausted drivers, no reckless drivers results in considerable safety improvements.

Neither: Operation costs are roughly the same. The taxes to account for increased costs of road maintenance are offset by much lower insurance premiums.

Con: The cars are more expensive. In today’s dollars, you can add about $8,000 to the cost of any given car. However, the increased safety means that driving smaller cars becomes more possible. So while a 4-door economy car might cost $20,000, you can get a 2-seat Smart-size car for $15,000 and a one-seat bucket car for about $12,000. Nobody would have to buy the Antcar right away because there would be a ten-year transition period, but you would have to factor these higher prices into future cars purchased.

Pro: A more productive populace. People can (sorta) work in their cars. I say “sorta” because they can’t lay papers out everywhere or anything cause the car would be turning and breaking and even if there were some signals to alert the driver, it could be kind of tough in a lot of circumstances. They can unwind during the drive rather than when they get home. Cell phone calls are now guilt-free.

Pro: The makers of the (capital-A) Antcar enjoy a market advantage but not an absolute one. They’re willing to submit to standards so that their cars can cooperate with cars made by other companies. They already do somewhat, but they understand that the standards are going to become much more rigid. In other words, they would not have a monopolistic advantage.

Con: The government would have to administer these standards. A cynical person would point out that they may not always necessarily do so with the public interest in mind.

Con: Everywhere an individual driver goes becomes a matter of record. Law enforcement and courts can subpoena it the same way that they can subpoena phone records. A drug dealer is arrested and theoretically they can look through the records and see everybody that’s visited that house or street in the last thirty days or longer or whatever the records say. Divorce proceedings could unmask precisely where the husband or wife has been. And so on. Definite loss of privacy.

Pro: The ability to investigate where people have been would help the police solve crimes. It could also help innocent people establish alibis.

Con: No more driving. No more getting a turbo-engine car that you can rev up. These cars would still be available, but you really couldn’t drive them anywhere. The engines in the Antcar (and its competitors) would be pretty standard in terms of capabilities. Having a muscle car would not be nearly as advantageous since the cars would be navigating in a more cooperative manner.

Pro: Reduced traffic times. No more accidents means no more accidents causing delays. No red lights at intersections where nobody is coming. Lane merges because much less painful. Eventually it will get to the point that traffic lanes themselves are no longer necessary, though the antcars are not yet ready for that.

Con: Driving in inclement weather can become difficult or impossible. These things are directed by satellite so things that disrupt a satellite signal would make the car not work. When signals are lost and are cutting in and out, the car can let you direct it (you tell it to turn right ahead and then you tell it when to turn left and so on), but it’s a real hassle.

So… what do you think? Here are some options, though I’d like you to elaborate if you have any further thoughts.

a) I would absolutely support banning drivercars. Safety is a premium consideration. Not just the lives saved, but the freedom from fear on being on the road after 2am would absolutely make it worth it.
b) I would probably support banning drivercars. I’m concerned about some aspect of it or another, though.
c) I couldn’t support banning drivercars on libertarian grounds. People should never lose the freedom to drive (and conceal where they’ve been) even if it results in the loss of life and a significant reduction of accidents.
d) I can’t support it because I don’t trust our government to play fair with standards and not play favorites.
e) It’s hard to answer your question because you didn’t explore what I would consider to be a significant factor and/or your prediction on some aspect or another is so far off-base I can’t suspend my disbelief that far.
f) What’s an Antcar? I’ve never heard of that. I don’t think this technology exists. I also don’t understand the meaning of the word “hypothetical.”

Update: New Pro and Con added.

I recently saw the movie Funny People and absolutely loved it. The more I think about it, the more I like it. It’s not a movie for everybody, though. But there were a couple of scenes that strike into one of the themes of Hit Coffee and other blogs in this neighborhood in the sphere. This post will contain no notable spoilers for anyone interested in the movie. I should add, though, that what I’m writing about is not what the movie is about, so don’t go and see the movie expecting it to be an artistic investigation of the Plight of the Nice Guy.

The two main characters are George, a successful stand-up comedian, and Ira, a young upstart who is hired on as an assistent and joke-writer. While George is something of a jerk with two strong romantic hooks – his money and celebrity. Ira is the quintessential Passive Male (a term that I will use in place of Nice Guy or Beta for the sake of accuracy and to strip it of some of the baggage of its conversational context). He’s slow to act on his romantic and sexual whims. He was overweight growing up and had an unfortunate name. He’s kind of a “keep your head down and try to get ahead in your own way” sort of guy. While George lives in a mansion, Ira lives on a fold-up bed in the apartment of his friend Mark (who is a minor celebrity himself).

There are two scenes that stand out in defining Ira’s romantic failures. The first occurs on his outing with George where the two of them bring home two girls to have sex with. While George is taking care of the first, Ira is abysmally failing with the second. She informs him flatly that nothing is going to happen and that she has a boyfriend. When George is done with the first, he then has sex with the second. The importance of the boyfriend, it turned out, was of variable importance depending on who else was sexually available to her.

The second and more important occurs when Mark brings home Daisy, a girl that Ira is known to be interested in. Mark is trying to set Ira up with him, but Ira fails to move. Not just because of passivity, but one gets the impression that even if he hadn’t been caught up in George’s whirlwind, he still wouldn’t have sealed the deal in the time frame (ten days) Mark gave him before Mark would bed her himself. About three weeks later, Ira has done nothing more than ask her to a Wilco show and Mark sleeps with her.

Ira, predictably, explodes. In The World According to William, his anger at Mark was justified. You sleep with the apple of your friend’s eye at your own peril. His anger at Daisy, though, was not. He accuses her of being a star{fornicator} and generally loose. She asks him if he would really refrain from sleeping with a super-hot girl that he just met and he basically said, “Right away? Yeah, I would!” because he genuinely prefers to move slow, get to know the girl, and so on. She is skeptical, but ultimately unapologetic. She has a right to her sex life and her own rules and is under no obligation to abide by his.

She is, of course, completely right. He had no monopoly on her sex life. Her rules were her own and she never asked him to go slow. Mark was willing. She was willing. Their choice, not Ira’s. And on and on. Yet, while she clearly won the argument, Ira’s pain and frustration was palpable and completely understandable. And it’s one of those things that strike a chord with a segment of the male population. Contrary to the claims of some, it isn’t simply about entitlement. He was doing what he was supposed to be doing, being sweet and nice and unaggressive… and he seemingly lost out in part because of it.

When growing up, we’re told that being nice is a way to win the girl. We’re told that pressuring is a bad thing. We’re told that women prefer a guy that is sweet to a guy that is sexually aggressive. So, it naturally follows, if we do what we’re supposed to do, we should get the girl. Okay, well not any girl, but we should at least have the advantage over a guy that does none of these thing. When we are respectful of the fact that someone wants to “go slow” (not in the movie, but frequently in real life) or has a boyfriend (the first girl from the movie), we suffer an indignity when a guy that ignores these things, is disrespectful of what she claims to want, suddenly gets what we wanted.

This is something that Phi, and a lot of guys, discuss constantly. It’s something I’m sure I’ve gone off on a rant about in the past. And it’s not wrong. A guy that gets frustrated with this should not simply be seen as the predatory friend who wants to slink his way into her bed. Sometimes they’re manipulative SOB’s trying to wear the underdog uniform to get some play, but sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re just guys that have done what is asked of them and have sometimes lost out again and again and not simply because they’re going after the ultra-hot girls. While my compassion and understanding of their situation is limited (it doesn’t matter how many times you get your heart broken nearly so much as it matters that you find the girl that doesn’t break your heart in the end), I’ve been there. I’ve felt it. My heart does go out.

There are, however, a few caveats.

The first is selective hearing. The truth is that guys get all sort of mixed signals on how to pick up a girl. We’re told that they want us to be respectful, but we are also told to sweep them off their feet. The difference between pleasant flirtation and sexual harassment depends as much on how the advances are received as on how aggressive they are. It’s like when I was a kid and I was told that exercise was good for you and rest was good for you and since I preferred rest I rested a lot. Since our passive social personalities do not lend themselves to being sexually aggressive or socially dominant, we listen more heavily to the advice that walks us down the path that we are more comfortable and capable of taking.

We also, by virtue of the fact that we are human and are not omniscient, don’t know which girls we have a shot at and which ones we don’t. This isn’t simply a matter of the nerd going after the chearleader. There have been some plain girls that I have been attracted to that didn’t know I existed while other more attractive girls that were approaching me. It didn’t matter what Ira did with George’s groupie. He wasn’t going to get sex. He did not have the one thing that she was willing to forsake her relationship for. His passivity was, in the end, utterly irrelevant.

In a lot of cases where a guy thinks that he misplayed his cards, in actuality he had a pretty bum hand to begin with. Sometimes she’s out of his league or sometimes she’s just looking for characteristics he lacks or is wary of characteristics (and not just passivity) that he has. Sometimes she is just at a point where she is only willing to move forward with someone that is truly exceptional and she will either not care that he is uninterested in anything more than a lay or she will convince herself that she can sleep her way into a relationship.

One of the more frustrating things I saw over the years was some variation of the following story. Jill just got out of a relationship or got her heart broken by some guy that she was never in a relationship with. She starts sorta-dating Jack. They don’t have sex. They’re not an official relationship. But they may hold hands or dispassionately kiss. He wants to date her and maybe has said so, but she just says that she is not ready and wants to go slow. Then she meets Jeff and has sex with him. The exact circumstances differ. Sometimes they weren’t even sorta-dating. Sometimes they were doing more than dispassionately kissing but were not sleeping together. Sometimes she didn’t just meet Jeff but instead Jeff is the guy that broke her heart that she swore she would never talk to again.

There are numerous ways to read the above dynamic. None of them make her look good, though some make her look worse than others. Some of them can make him look bad, too, but unless he seriously starts harassing her not nearly as bad. At least, that’s the guy’s perspective. Some women will immediately leap to her defense and say that she didn’t know what she wanted until she wanted it and that he failed to deal with that and therefore any of the pain caused was completely caused by him. That’s just not true. In the most charitable interpretation, she was not being honest (either with herself or him) about what was preventing them from having sex. He was investing under false pretenses that were signalled by the girl. In the least charitable interpretation, she knew she wanted nothing to do with him but used sex as a dangling carrot for companionship and the feeling of being desired.

But it is often the case that she is not being honest with herself. She really thinks the issue is that she is just not ready yet and only discovers when she meets Jeff that this is not the case. In fact, given the degree of self-deception I’ve seen in my thirty-plus years on this earth, I think that this is as often as not going to be the case. The room for doubt is what she should have known when. A guy owes it to himself to keep the potential for self-deception in mind when he invests in a relationship. And if he broaches the subject and she swears up and down that it’s her and not him, that doesn’t relieve him of his self-obligation. If she is deceiving herself, she doesn’t know that’s not the case.

Strategies aside, though, perhaps the most important aspect of the above dynamic is that, in the end, he never really had a chance with her. Not necessarily that she was “too good” for him, but her interest in him was (despite what she may have thought or hoped at the time) never a sufficient foundation for a sexual relationship. His mistake was not being a nice guy and not being a jerk. If he’d thrown himself at her, he would likely have been just as humiliated. The only upshot would have been that it would have happened sooner rather than later and he would have saved himself some time and effort. But he wouldn’t have gotten the girl. Not for very long, anyway. His niceness wasn’t the problem. He was the problem. Or she was. Or he and she together were. That’s not to say that there is nothing he could have done to change the situation. Sometimes there isn’t, but sometimes there is. But it requires something a lot less vague than “don’t be so nice” or “be a jerk” or even “be more aggressive.”

On that last one, excessive passivity is a problem. If you play a good doormat, people will see you as a doormat. If you never ask a girl out, you’re almost never going to go out with a girl. If you never make the move for sex, you’re rarely going to get sex. Unfortunately, a lot of passive people read things like this and think, in a self-congratulatory sort of way, that the problem is that they’re too nice. Or that if they were less nice that they would have more success. At that point, it depends on what you consider “nice”. But most guys that can’t get laid being nice and passive also have problems if they decide to become jerks. I know a lot of romantically lonely jerks. At this point in my life, far more lonely jerks than nice guys.

Instead, I think it’s one of those things where you see where you are on the introversion/extroversion and active/passive scales and try, not to be extroverted or aggressive, but to simply become less introverted and less passive. I personally did sporadically well on the first front and poorly on the second except when it mattered most with the woman that I would later marry. And even then, I came really close to blowing it with my passivity.

In the end, passivity is not a virtue. Guys that have been lead to believe otherwise (often by equating passivity with respectfulness or chastity) have been done a disservice. And I can definitely understand the frustration as this settles in. I just don’t want that frustration to fuel other non-productive ideas.

Many years ago, I started chatting online to a young woman whose father happened to have worked for Wildcat Engineering & Design, where I was working at the time. We made a little game of it that I would find out who her father was, her phone number, and give her a call. She bet me that I couldn’t because he hadn’t worked there in a couple years. I eventually narrowed it down to two names, both of which turned out to be wrong because she thought her father was a Machinist rather than a Welder. Once that was cleared up, I got it right. It’s one of those things that would have made a “good story for the grandchildren” if we’d had any. Which, of course, we didn’t. What did happen was that I found the mall where she worked, clandestinely stopped by, bought an ice cream cone from her, and we never really talked again. She was… substantially overweight.

Maybe she had a thyroid problem. Maybe she had a crappy metabolism. Maybe she was actually healthier than some of the slimmer girls that I had either dated or wanted to date who smoked. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I didn’t find her attractive and the weight was the primary reason for that. She was a nice enough girl, though her personality wasn’t really enough to overcome that. There are cases where I did indeed date someone quite heavy, but notably in those cases I was the one that was doggedly pursued and I was the one that “stopped calling” once I determined that, for whatever reason, it didn’t seem like it was going to work. I don’t think I ever directly attributed it to weight, but I do suspect that in both cases if they had been less overweight I would have less hesitant.

I would like to think that if I met (or got to know) a perfectly wonderful person that was overweight, I would be able to get past it. I think that I could in some cases, particularly if they gained weight after I fell in love with them, but my track record doesn’t bear it out. Not just because of the three girls mentioned above, but because of a fourth. Someone who was a really, really great friend at a time that I needed one. Someone who listened to me whine and get petulantly angry but who nonetheless always listened and was there for me. One day, I decided to consider investigating things further. Her DMV profile said that she was 5’2″ and 270lbs. I never followed up on that.

None of these had anything at all to do with health. None of these were about her “failure to take care of herself” or because she “didn’t respect her body”. I may have told myself these things at one point in time so that I could look myself in the mirror, but the reality of the situation is 20/20 clear in hindsight. I didn’t want to date a substantially overweight person. I had no problem dating someone that was as overweight as I was or even a little more. In some cases I actively pursued people that were more overweight than I was. But not much more, and none that fell into the “morbidly obese” columns on the BMI chart. If I myself had been morbidly obese, I suspect that my expectations would have adjusted. But one of the benefits to being somewhat rather than gargantuanly overweight was that I did not have to adjust my expectations downward.

That I am superficial enough to care about weight is not something that I am particularly proud of. I wish I wasn’t. But it is the way that I was built. Further, all of the social conditioning I have received about not judging a book by its cover is not sufficient to counter the social conditioning component of (middle-class white) America’s (and much of the world’s) aversion to dating fat people.

My old flame Tracey Roberts made a comment several years back that stuck with me. In the years after she and I parted ways, she entered into depression and self-esteem desolation (for which I may have been a factor but was not a primary one). She gained considerable weight. On her LiveJournal account, she said that she is told over and over again that any man that cares about her weight is not worth her time. To which she commented, “I don’t think it can be true that 90% of men are not my time.”

Now, we could turn this around and say that the reason she had trouble finding a man was not the weight but rather the depression that played a role in it. Also, we could say that the men were off-put by the health implications of her weight or because she didn’t take care of herself. The problem with all of this is that, well, it’s bunk. The depression that put the weight on subsided, but the weight was still there. The self-esteem problems the weight caused were caused by the weight and the reaction of people (men, primarily) to it, so it’s equally hard to say that the self-esteem caused by the fat-averse is grounds for the fat-averse to be fat-averse. As for taking care of herself, she put a lot more effort into that than a lot of naturally thin people. Maybe she was eating late-night cakes and outsized portions at meals (I wouldn’t know), but she also hit the gym quite regularly (that I do know). I’m not saying that she was incapable of losing the weight, but it wasn’t the case that she wasn’t trying even if she was failing.

But to put a finer point on it, even if she had a thyroid problem and the medical documentation to prove it and if she was otherwise healthy (normal blood-sugar, blood pressure, etc) and the medical documentation to prove it, how many of the men that would cite health concerns as a reason not to date her would seriously reconsider? I would wager quite few. Actually, I would wager a number barely statistically significant from 0%.

No, the main reason that we are averse to dating fat people is that we do not find it aesthetically pleasing. I am coming out and admitting it. A lot of people won’t. They will try to turn it into a health issue or a discipline issue or a moral issue and everything they can to avoid admitting to being that superficial. And though I don’t think the health aspect of it is entirely a ruse (many such people won’t date smokers, either), I think that if it’s true that they would not date someone with a thyroid problem that they can’t seriously attribute it to health, discipline, or morality. Rather, we attribute it to those things so that we can feel better about ourselves. I don’t think that everybody is necessarily lying, unless we count self-deception.

I am a believer that there are “noble myths”, meaning that there are certain truths that we are better off ignoring or glossing over. A part of me wonders if that may be the case with dating fat people. Because the more we openly admit that it’s an aesthetic preference, the more validity we assign to it. We grant cover to human-nature-can’t-be-denied types and reinforce the validity of assumptions and behaviors that, while we can’t eliminate, we can try to minimize. While I don’t think that anybody should be socially pressured into dating people that they are not attracted to, I think that allowing it to be more freely declared leads to a greater social stigma on dating a fat person to the point that someone that would otherwise keep an open-mind would discriminate on that basis not based on their own preferences but because of concern regarding society’s reaction to their decision. I also worry that lending cover to people that believe that discrimination on weight and appearance is perfectly acceptable would allow some men whose wives had gained weight (and vice-versa) to rationalize infidelity the same way that certain commenters on Half Sigma wanted to give Mark Sanford a pass because men are hard-wired to be attracted to younger, fertiler women.

On the other hand, the use of health, discipline, and morality already allow for some of what I fear would happen in a society where discrimination against weight were considered even more okay than it is now. It provides a respectable face to a generally unfortunate (if not entirely avoidable) aspect of human nature. Strip that respectable face from it and more people might approach it the same way they do, say, an undesirable height or facial feature. It may not change their behavior, but it would add a little more compassion for those left behind in the dating arena. Further, to the extent to which we add a stigma to announcing that we don’t want to date fat people because they’re ugly, we’re making it so that only the more callous and indifferent people will admit to what’s really going on. That allows overweight people to take the moral high ground rather than see their dating handicap for what it really is. And, the myth of the health/discipline/morality rationale leads quite frankly to questions like Tracey asks.

The answer to Tracey’s question is actually yes. Men that won’t date a fat woman are not worth a fat woman’s time. The same goes for nerds who are frustrated with women’s unwillingness to date nerds. But the answer is also no. That men or women won’t date you does not make them immoral, bad people. It makes them, well, people. It does no good to judge people on the basis of a test that the vast majority of everybody will fail.

Michael Duff ponders the negative affect that Facebook can have on marriages. Over a dozen users chime in about how Facebook has ruined or is ruining their marriages.

It’s tempting to dismiss this sort of thing under the banner of “If Facebook is ruining your marriage, it must have been weak to begin with.” It’s not unlike comments I’ve seen in the past that prostitution does not pose a threat to a good marriage. There is certainly an element of truth to that, but I think the natural rejoinder is that (a) some strong marriages have weak points and (b) weak marriages are often worth preserving.

The studies I’ve seen suggest that divorce does not make people happier than people that stay in unhappy marriages and that children of divorce tend to do better socially and perform better in school that do children of parents in unhappy marriages. Obviously, there are cases where this it is better for one party, the other, the children, or everybody involved. But I have yet to see a study suggesting that this is more true more often than it is false. So it’s far from clear that “she’s better off without him” (if he cheats due to Facebook) or “he’s better off without her” (if the same).

The Internet as a tool of divorce is certainly nothing new. My business law professor, who also handled divorces, talked about how the Internet was a marriage-killer because of a case he worked on where a woman left her husband for some guy on the Internet that she’d never even met (and who hadn’t met her and had not been informed that she had gained considerable weight since the time of the picture she provided). So is Facebook really all that different?

In a way, I think it might be. Not in the way that Duff suggests, though. I think the unique danger posed by Facebook is that it provides a socially acceptable way for people to contact and stay in contact with old flames and former lovers. And it provides a socially acceptable way for people to stay in contact with friends of the opposite sex, allowing things to inappropriately progress, that would otherwise raise flags or be harder to defend.

There’s nothing wrong with having friends of the opposite sex, of course. But ideally, when you do, there are some relatively firm parameters that if you feel the inclination to pass through that you should instead give pause. If there were a woman in my life that I would like to hang out with (platonically, I’d swear), but for some indescribable reason I would prefer Clancy not be present, that would be a signal to me that I should probably not be alone with this woman.

There is sort of a problem with this, which is that by coming out and saying that, we’re suggesting that we want to sleep with them or otherwise want to cheat on our spouse. If we don’t want to admit that there is a problem, we may set ourselves up for one just to prove that none exists. But even if there isn’t a problem, you don’t necessarily want her to be there if one should arise. I know far too many guys that have been burned with the belief that “Oh, I’m happy in my relationship” and “Oh, nothing is going to happen”. Of course, the vast majority of the time nothing does happen. But the consequences for the times when something does are devastating. As the saying goes, better safe than sorry. At the very least, you want to be asking yourself some tough questions about what she has to offer you that a same-gender friend does not.

The problem posed by Facebook is that it easily allows us to sidestep these questions. The mechanism for getting back in touch and staying in touch is already there. And it is gender neutral. “Hey, I’m looking up lots of people from high school. Why should my prom date be any different?” and then even if you get past that point you still have all the rationalizations to use from other scenarios mentioned in the previous paragraph.

For my part, I have a lot of female “friends” on Facebook, including one ex-girlfriend (Julie). I consider Julie to be safe because even in the Elseworlds event that I were unhappy with my marriage and did want to cheat, she is one of the last people that I would cheat with. If Clancy were to leave me or die, she is not among those I would consider dating. There are other cases where the circumstances are just a little more complicated than that. People that I will always view from a romantic standpoint and with whom every encounter I have ever had has involved things that would be inappropriate for a married man. I am relatively sure that I could, with enough effort, force a platonic friendship and excise all inappropriateness. But frankly, without the sexual or romantic carrot, there’s simply no reason to. They have nothing to offer me that I can’t get from a male friend. So from there I either make the decision not to friend them or if I do it’s only out of the curiosity of finding out what they’re up to and I make no effort to forge any sort of real friendship with them.

The older and more firmly married I get, the more I have come to appreciate boundaries. Some of the problems listed in Duff’s comment section are from people whose spouses refuse to cut off people when asked. That is definitely, in my view, indicative of a problem. My wife has absolutely nothing to fear from anybody on my friends list and really nothing to fear from the people that I intentionally left off. But if for any reason it makes her uncomfortable, that should be reason enough to take it out of the box of potential problems. Clancy is generally not the jealous sort. Julie was, though. And Julie was wrong and wrong over and over again about who did or did not constitute a threat to our relationship… until she was right.

I feel very fortunate that I am in a marriage where Facebook does not even remotely apply as any sort of threat. That’s not just a verdict on our marriage, but also on her unshakable integrity and my absolute determination not to enter the brotherhood of unfaithful husbands. Not everyone is as fortunate.

The Econoholic came out of hiding to write a post about George Sodini. My favorite clip:

Can we really not add 1 and 1 and find that we get 11? Yet, versions of this very same spiel exist on the blogs of self-proclaimed betas all over the internet. Guys who know how to expertly solder while they eat their cornflakes in their underwear can’t figure out why women can’t look past the complete hatred they have for them and just {fornicate with} them for free. After all, they aren’t too ugly or two weird.

As mentioned before, I’m reading Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, a collected of essays regarding pop culture from a Gen-X perspective. In his first (awesome) essay, This Is Emo, he mentions how he was able to translate a Woody Allen schtick into romantic success.

It got me thinking of something I’d been meaning to write about since I told Barry that I would a long while back. I can’t entirely remember what he had to do with it, but in my drafts is a note to myself to write about “Need a hook — for Barry.”

When I was coming into high school, I asked my older brother Oliver what the secret to girls was. My brother Mitch and I had never had a whole lot of success. Mitch had been able to muster up girls for dances, but he seemed to be stuck in the role as that sweet guy that girls got to know and like but didn’t seem to date. Maybe he just never actually asked them out. Ollie, on the other hand, always had a girlfriend from about the tenth grade on.

When I asked Ollie the question, he sort of shrugged it off. It was as though I had asked him how to drink water. You just put it in your mouth and swallow. You just ask the girl and if she says yes then you’re good to go. Presumably he was aware that they could say no, but I don’t think that they ever did. I told him about my difficulties getting to know girls to ask out and he said that they always just kind of hung around him. “The answer to your question,” he said, “is to be really good at basketball.”

It was a frustrating answer, but in its own way it was one of the most stunningly accurate answers I ever got. Be good at basketball. He was good at basketball. Girls befriended him. He asked girls out and they said yes. Mitch and I were both actually good at basketball in our own right, but not in the stand-out way that he was. Had he not stopped growing at 5’10”, he could have played at the college level.

Of course, the secret to success isn’t to be good at basketball. A lot of guys who aren’t good at basketball get girlfriends. But the grand truth behind Ollie’s answer is that the secret is to have something that makes you remarkable. He was a jock. Then, in college, he was a former jock. So he had the kinds of girlfriends that hung out with former jocks.

One of the reasons that fuels the whole notion that Nice Guys Finish Last in love is that a lot of guys that identify as Nice do so because they haven’t much else to rely on. They’re not former jocks or writers or musicians… they’re nice. Often too passive to aggressively declare a personality. Sometimes so eager to fit in they wear an identity that doesn’t fit them. At all.

That’s not to say that they are actually dull people. Sometimes they are quite interesting to certain groups of people. But they are interesting in ways that that are utterly unappealing to girls. I know one guy that I can talk about computers with forever and I think he’s a great guy and would make a great boyfriend… but I have no idea what he would talk about to a girl unless she was also into computers. There’s a scarcity of supply to meet that demand.

Anyway, contributing to the whole notion of “girls like bad boys” is that bad boys quite frequently have a hook. An angle. An identity. So while the actual number of girls interested in that sort of thing actually may be somewhat limited, they’re easy to identify. There are a lot of girls that Ollie could have asked out in high school who probably would have said “no”… but those weren’t the girls that generally hung around him.

One of the bigger mistakes that I made when I was younger was not to do a better job of forming a solid external identity. You could say that I wanted to be all things to all people, but it was more a case of not wanting to be the wrong person for the wrong people. So in some ways I came across as a rather bland fellow. I suppose I still do, but it doesn’t matter anymore because I’m married.

The points at which I had the most success were those in which I was able to play on my home field. Not simply “be myself”, but to play to (and accentuate) my strengths.

When I met Clancy, she had read portions of the blog that I was writing at the time. A blog not too much unlike this one, actually. The most conventionally attractive women that I was ever with (the one that was the most “out of my league”) was attracted to the fact that I was a prolific (if unpublished) writer. Despite all of this, I was always relatively slow to mention the fact that I wrote and even slow to draw attention to the articulate and intelligent aspects of my personality because I felt that both were unhelpful.

And to a lot of people, of course, they were. Willie (and no doubt others) came to the conclusion that I was a pseudo-egghead who was preoccupied with sounding smart. And coming across as anything but down-to-earth has liabilities with a substantial portion of the female population and so my creativity was its own liability.

What I failed to truly appreciate was that these things were liabilities to the wrong people. They were people that I needed to write off in search for right people. I was so scared to death of writing people off that I failed to attract people that would have been interested in the me that it’s most easy for me to be.

It all harkens back to my post a little while back about Drake Mathers and Kenny Chesney. There is a lot to be said for knowing your market. Not only what your market is, but also what it isn’t.

Of course, you have to be careful that your market is some number greater than zero. This is not about “being yourself” or any of that feel-good claptrap. If who you are is somebody that does not cultivate any desire from anybody, you need to change who you are. If your interests are utterly mundane and of no interest to most women, it would help to get some new interests. For one thing, it’s one of the easiest ways to meet people. For another, it helps to have something to put under “interests” that doesn’t repel female-types.

But I think that you have to find something that you are genuinely interested in doing or genuinely good at.The answer for Ollie was basketball in high school. That isn’t the right answer for 99% of most guys. For me it might have been the school paper or {gasp} honors classes. I was somewhat fortunate in that the guy that I naturally became without even thinking about it (a heady-in-cloudy geek with enough social skills so as to avoid embarrassing anybody when meeting friends and family) had its own market. It wasn’t a big market, mind you, but in the end it only takes one.

This post didn’t exactly turn out like I had imagined. I don’t think I even got around to the part that involved Barry (whatever that part was). And it didn’t have quite as tight a central thesis as I might have liked. But such is life, and inexplicably being laid back and patient is one of my hooks.

Back when I was at Southern Tech, I struck up a friendship with a girl named Renata Guittierez. Despite having very different political views, we got along well in most every other respect, did quite well hanging out with each others’ friends and family, and turned out to have mutual friends like Hubert and Will, most of whom she’d known during high school while I met them in the dorms.

In fact, numerous friends continually tried to get us to date. We both demurred – probably for the best given that she met her eventual husband at Hubert’s wedding.

Throughout the years, the one major issue on which we were opposed has always been politics. She’s extremely activist; I’m more laid-back. She has “key issues” on which, quite frankly, I think the fundamental premise is fatally flawed. Despite this, even our political discussions were usually quite lively and fun, because we didn’t take anything said personally, and because we both knew to stay on the realm of discussing policy rather than mouthing the usual platitudes/insults that pass for “political discussion” from the political parties these days. Any time I wanted to mentally say “all members of X party are Z”, I mentally remind myself of Renata and Hubert, who didn’t come even close to that 95% of the time.

A while ago, however, she and her husband moved away from Colosse, so that he could take an offered job in neighboring Pontchartrain. Ever since, her level of political discourse has been steadily deteriorating. Very little is about policy for her any more – it’s much more about making personal insults towards leaders of the opposition party, while explaining away her party’s very real faults as being something the other side supposedly “cooked up” or that “shouldn’t matter.” Whereas before, I could count on her for a relatively accurate fecometric (read: how much of an asshole are they) reading on a politician from her own party, that’s no longer the case.

I’m beginning to wonder about Pontchartrain. I know it has a growing Hispanic population. I know it’s more heavily tilted towards her side of the aisle. I didn’t think it would do that much damage, however, and I have to confess some serious concerns as to whether the city itself is such an echo chamber, or whether the move to a new city – and her strident political careerism plus the ability to “pick” a new set of local friends, most likely gleaned from her starting pool of political colleagues – has simply led her to construct a close-knit echo chamber of “new friends” with some extreme blinders as to the fact that we on the other side are not, in fact, represented by some of the vitriolic rhetoric she’s lately been spreading.