A little while back Mark Ragnerus wrote a piece in the Washington Post that got a lot of response. The question is whether it’s good for society that we marry later and later. Ragnerus thinks not:

Third, the age at which a person marries never actually causes a divorce. Rather, a young age at marriage can be an indicator of an underlying immaturity and impatience with marital challenges — the kind that many of us eventually figure out how to avoid or to solve without parting. Unfortunately, well-educated people resist this, convinced that there actually is a recipe for guaranteed marital success that goes something like this: Add a postgraduate education to a college degree, toss in a visible amount of career success and a healthy helping of wealth, let simmer in a pan of sexual variety for several years, allow to cool and settle, then serve. Presto: a marriage with math on its side.

Too bad real life isn’t like that. Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you’re fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life. “Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth,” added Tennyson to his lines about springtime and love.

A lot of the debate over whether or not Ragnerus is right or wrong depends on how stridently you believe that he makes his case. A lot of the people making the most pointed criticisms say that he’s arguing that people need to just find the nearest partner and get married (no, he’s not). A lot of Ragnerus’s defenders are saying that he’s only making the point that people that are in loving, committed relationships should not put off marriage (no, he’s saying a lot more than that).

Ragnerus’s point, as I read it, is that society has decided that marriage is something that comes after we’ve had our years of self-discovery and have established ourselves independently and that this is not a positive social development. This nebulous concept of self-discovery doesn’t help and may hurt long-term marriage prospects when it takes up prime reproductive years and that it can make us less amenable to the bonding that marriage should entail because we have already so firmly established ourselves as individuals.

I am of a mixed mind as to whether or not Ragnerus is right. When I was living in the Mormon west, I got to see an American subculture that is as Ragnerus wants it to be. Marriage is utmost on the concerns of people years before it is in the urban and suburban south where I came from. Deseret’s rates of marriage success and failure is midling, which is impressive when you consider the frequency of marriage out there and the young age at which people get married… but it also makes the case that strong social institutions and young marriages are not enough to “save” marriage.

My main objection to Ragnerus is that even if he is right and that it would be better if we all married younger, such a cultural shift would be very hard to institute. Ragnerus himself notes that there is a stigma to younger marriage (Deseret being a conspicuous exception). An individual that decides to buck this trend needs to find another individual deciding the same. They’re going to be looking for things that their contemporaries are not. If you’re a 21 year old looking for marriage, unless you’re Mormon (or similarly religious) or in a sub-culture where college degrees are scarce, you’re going to scare people away with talk like that.

Beyond that, young people today simply aren’t equipped to find a life partner at that age. They often don’t have a clear idea of what to look for. Tell a 21-year old to start looking for a wife and he will probably use the same criteria he uses to find a girlfriend. That has the potential for a lot of problems.

On the other hand, if you tell them at 18 that they need to find someone by 23, you’re likely to get better results. They’re more likely to start appraising people more on their marry-worthiness rather than how hot, exciting, or fascinating they are. Then the trial and error of the college years may well produce people with a much better idea of what they want and don’t want when they get married. Right now, the college and post-college years are spent pursuing people that they want to be with either in a casual sexual relationship or a tentatively exclusive one. In the latter case, the sort of relationship where marriage might happen someday, but there’s no rush and it’s more about enjoying the here-and-now.

A lot of my thoughts on this (of course) go back to my own experiences. I almost got engaged at the age of 22 or so and that marriage would not likely have been a happy one. Further, my partnership with Julie was not founded on how hot or exciting she was. The criteria I used was the criteria everyone is told to use when looking for a spouse. She was pretty, but she was also warm (to me at any rate), loving, kind, loyal, likely to be a good mother for future children, and so on. Had I acted on those impulses, though, it would have been disastrous because she was lacking other things that I didn’t realize were important. It was when I was gearing up to engage that the sheer horror of our future together started to set in.

So the question I ask myself, when considering Ragnerus’s proposition, is whether or not in a society that pushes young marriages I would have gone forward. Two years in, things were wonderful for us and I might just have plunged ahead. If so, then I cannot possibly endorse Ragnerus’s ideas. But it’s also possible that had I been keeping an eye on marriage from the start, it’s possible that I would have noticed everything that was missing from our equation and moved on a lot more quickly, looking for my future Clancy or whoever else I might have ended up with. It was, after all, the notion of marrying her that dislodged her from my life. But those observations were made in a social atmosphere where becoming engaged at 22 or 23 was considered foolhardy despite over four years of couplehood.

I go back and forth.

One last thing to mention is that some people are saying that people shouldn’t get married until they are personally ready and that this should be considered a personal, not a cultural, issue. I disagree with this pretty strongly. First off, as I mentioned above, if you’re going against the grain you’re likely to have a lot more difficulty finding a partner. Second, as Ragnerus notes, peer pressure is a huge issue.

It’s a lot less to be in a committed relationship when none of your friends are. It was a real issue in my life during the Julie years. My friends were all talking about going out and finding someone and who they were interested in and all that and there I was at the table with little to contribute because I’d already found someone. That didn’t play any significant role in my leaving Julie, but it did contribute to the notion that I was missing out on someone much better out there and at least I was missing out on going out with the guys and doing single guy things. Now, as it turned out, I was missing out on someone better (Hi, Clancy!). But I am pretty sure I would have had those feelings even if I hadn’t been. But now, here I am nearly a decade later, and most of my friends are also married or cohabitating with someone that they are likely to marry. It would suck, suck, suck to be single now… at a time when our marriages (and such) are part of our common experience.

A little while back Phi pointed to a fellow pointing to two studies suggesting that attractive people make better violinists. Assortive mating is mentioned as the culprit. Assortive mating, of course, is the notion that more desirable people reproduce with more desirable people and less with less. This creates a convergence of beauty and talent. I wouldn’t be surprised if that did play a significant role in the correlation between violin-playing ability and attractiveness, but I have another idea as to what might be the cause.

It seems to me that becoming an accomplished violin player requires a great deal of discipline and a lot of focus. It’s not something that I would expect slobs to become very good at. While I know that a degree of natural talent is required, I don’t think that violining is more meritocratic than is, for example, singing. People are born with better and worse singing voices whether they get any formal training or not. Two people that have never received any sort of training will have vastly different abilities by the time they’re 20. Two people never trained on the violin will have the same ability.

So I expect that the discipline required to become a great violinist would carry over into diet and other things. I would also expect that the same parents that are more demanding of their children in regards to the violin would be more likely to police diet as well. So I would think that those, along perhaps with assortive mating, would be factors.

The fact that the same is true with singers throws me off, though. First, because much of my rationale with violins is not true of song. The second is because it runs contrary to stereotypes that seem to hold up in my personal life.

I remember a while back Clint met someone online and talked to them on the phone. He commented that she had a very attractive voice. This was, actually, a point of concern. He didn’t even have to tell me that because I knew. Heavy women, we had long since discovered, have the more attractive voices. We guessed – correctly, as it turned out – that his new online friend was overweight.

Maybe this is just the difference between speaking voices and singing voices, but we do carry images in our mind of the fat lady singing, don’t we?

But apparently this is not the case. Or maybe the listeners were tailoring their appraisals based on what they thought the person looked like. But that doesn’t realy make a whole lot of sense. Nobody is going to say “that nasally voice sounded great” because they internally associate nasality with attractiveness. So maybe assortive mating plays a bigger role than I’ve given it credit for.

The last thought is in response to Phi’s tangent about the island that his parents live on where there are many more women than then. It reminds me a bit of Episcopal Youth Church, where me and this other guy were in the youth group with a dozen or so females. You’d think that would be an ideal situation… but it really wasn’t. Instead the result was that there was a lot of girls talk that we were shut out of. They were nothing but nice to me, but there was a pretty obvious line that I was on the other side of this.

It also reminds me of a particular private university in Colosse, Gulf Christian University, known for its snobby women who only date rich men. There’s an email joke that makes the rounds every couple of years that lists jokey complaints from attendees of all of the local universities in the form of “What I want to know is…”. GCU’s entry was something along the lines of “What I want to know is why in a university that is 75% female it’s the other 25% that can never get laid!”

When I first read the Watchmen many years ago, some of the more frustrating aspects of the story involved Eddie Blake, the Comedian. Blake was an attempted rapist, the murderer of a woman bearing his child, Kennedy’s assassin and a ruthless plumber for Richard Nixon. Yet, throughout the entire story, all but two of the characters express some degree of admiration for him. Nobody calls him on it. The woman he tried to rape goes on to bear his child and becomes something of an apologist for him. Any reasonable reading of the character would paint him not as a hero but as a villain.

I don’t disagree with that, but as I’ve gotten older and repeatedly re-read and now watched the story unfold on screen, I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the character and an understanding of why he is viewed as he is.

The hardest aspect of the story to fully grasp is his exoneration at the hands of Sally Jupiter, the original Silk Spectre. The notion of a victim forgiving her would-be rapist is, on its face, abhorrant. How she could go on to bear his child and remember him fondly at his death is maddening. And, as I originally read it, seemingly unrealistic. But to understand their complex relationship means, in part, boiling it down to the relative simplicity of their characters.

Blake is the embodiment of unchecked masculinity. The prototypical “alpha male”, as powerful and forceful as anyone in the story whose skin isn’t blue. As morality and social propriety are primarily feminine contributions to society, he is naturally devoid of them. To his detriment, in the end.

Blake, in the end, loved Sally Jupiter. She is the only character throughout the entire work that he said even one positive thing about. The only person he allowed to emotionally injure him. As repulsive as the notion sounds and as much as it will sound like an apology that it is most definitely not meant to be, the attempted rape boiled down to a misunderstanding. He was sixteen (in the comic, 24 in the movie), intelligent but relatively uneducated and poorly socialized. In his way of thinking, if they both wanted sex (and he believed that they both did), the rest (such feminine things as morality and decency) were beside the point. When his initial move was rebutted, he flew into a rage and compounded the error.

This doesn’t make Blake an okay guy nor does it excuse what he did. More than nothing else, it exemplifies how dangerous he really is. A walking id with a mask and a gun. But with good looks and pure testosterone, a baser sort of woman could ask for little more.

Sally Jupiter, then, is exactly that baser woman. Whereas Blake embodies the dark sides of masculinity, she exemplifies that shallowness of femininity. Her beauty is her primary asset. Other than the ability to fight, her only asset. She becomes a hero not out of a desire to do good or instill justice, but out of self-interest and vanity. Whatever her physical strength, she displays almost no emotional strength whatsoever. Her sense of morality is based on little more than arbitrary rules built primarily to make herself look better and others (including her daughter) look worse. When she interceded on Eddie Blake’s attempts to introduce himself to their daughter, her primary motivation isn’t so much to protect her as it is to bury that which makes her look bad.

But just as Blake’s personality allows him to make a woman feel like a woman with his forcefulness, her (pre-bitterness) boisterousness and raw sexuality would almost certainly make a man feel like a man around her. He prized his masculinity; she prized her femininity. They brought it out in one another. The attempted rape is one of the darker scenes in a dark piece. But because it prevented these two people from being able to make the most of their shallow weaknesses, it was in its own way a tragic one.

If the love (and sexual tension) between Eddie and Sally was a case of two well-stacked people that should have been in love failing to partner up due to circumstances and their individual foibles, the romance between Dan Drieberg and Sally Jupiter’s daughter, Laurie Jespeczyk, was a case of two people only marginally compatible that partnered up mostly because circumstances allowed for it and neither was sufficiently flawed to blow it.

Neither the comic book nor the movie made a particularly convincing case for why Dan and Laurie were well matched. In fact, there is sort of the feeling you get when watching an action movie where the hero has a love interest mostly because he is supposed to and they run through the motions mostly because the genre requires it.

But I would argue that it was more significant than that. The complete lack of electricity in their relationship was indicative, in a way, of the situation that they were in.

It parallels the situation with Laurie’s mother a little bit. As far as the Minutemen were concerned, Eddie and Sally were the only two verified straight characters there were. Captain Metropolis, Hooded Justice, and the Silhouette were verified homosexuals. There were hints that Dollar Bill and Mothman were close enough that Bill’s death precipitated Mothman’s descent into madness. Hollis Mason was established as straight in a companion to the movie, but in the comic book he is a life-long bachelor with no mentioned romantic asperations. So there you had them, the man’s man and the woman’s woman in a room full of homosexuals and/or people without sexual conviction or success.

As far as the Watchmen/Crimebusters are concerned, you have gay Captain Metropolis (in the comic but not the movie), seemingly asexual Rorschach and Ozymandias, and four heterosexual characters (Eddie Blake, Dr Manhattan, Laurie, and Dan). Removing Blake from consideration because he is the only female character’s father, you have two straight males and a straight female. And in the course of the comic book (and the movie), you have the female (Laurie) leaving one male (Manhattan) for the other (Dan).

Whether or not there are heroes outside of the east coast is never fully established, but if there were they were never mentioned as being in contract with the main characters of the story. So there you are with three characters that spent much of their lives doing things that only a handful of people in the entire country ever do and as far as Laurie and Dan are concerned, those people are not potential romantic partners (except Dr Manhattan, whom Laurie is dissatisfied with at the start and whose sexuality is dissipating with his humanity at any rate).

So that Laurie and Dan would end up together by process of elimination is relatively significant. The only thing they have in common is their costumes, but when neither of them have that central part of their existence in common with anyone else, it’s enough to give one another a second and third look and however many looks it takes to fall in love.

It takes fewer looks for Dan because he is at the outset the classic beta male who, even if he were willing to put away his childish things, would probably have some trouble with women anyway. Even at the height of his career, during the Crimebusters meeting, Laurie comments that nobody but Dr Manhattan interested her. Dan was a relatively uncompelling fellow even before being washed up and overweight.

But that he was sidelined by the Keene Act was devestating to him. He was deprived of the one thing that gave him purpose. He only lit up when he was able to reach back into his glory days. While Hollis Mason and Veidt had careers to go to and Eddie Blake found an alternate outlet for his activities, Dan lacked the drive and motivation to do much with himself.

And socially speaking, he had the same sorts of problems that a lot of nerds do. His rich history of excitement and intrigue was somewhat off-limits due to his secret identity. His amazing inventions are geek toys. Everything that he does have to offer, intelligence and physical prowess, had been spent in service of something that was stripped from him and that he cannot talk about. He is probably the nicest guy in the whole story, but his only two friends are his predecessor and Laurie, who lives mostly in isolation with her big blue boyfriend.

In the comic (though not the movie), Laurie finds a signed picture of a vice queen that Dan busted wherein the queen expressed romantic interest. So remote was he prior to Laurie’s split with Manhattan that I had to wonder why precisely it was that he didn’t pursue that. She may have been a villain, but she was there and she probably understood his life better than most. It was a good thing he didn’t, of course, because he found Laurie, which given the givens is probably the best he could ever expect to do.

But what about Laurie? After having slept with the Most Powerful Man in the History of the World, why would she end up with an introverted gizmonerd? The romantic explanation would be that she left the powerful man that didn’t really care for her (in a way she could appreciate) for the sincere beta. As you’ve probably figured, I associate it mostly with his availability and her relative isolation.

Apart from her attractiveness, of course, she didn’t have much to offer. She’s somewhat like the unattractive girl in the Anime Club, where it doesn’t take much to get some sort of interest from somebody. Laurie is beautiful, of course, but she’s also obnoxious. In a sense, though, she is also a creature of the path of least resistance like Dan is. The main differences are that she was raised by her wildly extroverted mother and she has the striking looks that he lacks. If you’re going to be listless and pretty, it works out a lot better if you’re female.

It’s a sort of by-the-numbers thinking that lead her to completely overlook Dan at the Crimebusters/Watchmen meeting. She also had the perspective of a sixteen year old. But Manhattan was the biggest, most powerful thing around. It’s not surprising at all that she would gravitate towards that, blue skin or no. In the world in which she was raised, he was the biggest thing there was. It was only after years of emotional exhaustion that she gave up on that and figured that Dan would do.

In the action movies I mentioned where the romantic storylines are by-the-numbers and present only because of genreic requirements, when there is a sequel it’s often the case that the leading woman from that movie is conspicuously absent from the next so that they can start from scratch with another (usually uncompelling) romantic plot. Despite, or maybe because of, the somewhat electricity-free nature that Laurie transitioned from the powerful Manhattan to the meek Owl, I would suspect that ten years down the line that they would actually still be together.

When determining things like child custody and child support payments, the law generally considers what is in in the best interest of the child. I wrote a post on the late Bobvis blog about how the law should approach cases where the husband of the mother turns out not to be the father. Generally speaking, the law doesn’t care. At least not past a certain point. As far as the law in concerned, if he’s been acting as the child’s father, he becomes the legal father. This means in the event of a divorce that he can’t cease making child support payments and it means that she can’t use his lack of paternity as a reason to deny him custody or access to the child.

This strikes a lot of men as being unfair. If we find out ten years after the fact that a child is ours, we’re told that biology is destiny. If we find out ten years later that it isn’t, well biology isn’t so important after all. The counterargument is that fairness to the father (real or purported) is not the issue so much as the welfare of the child. The child did not choose to be born into that situation, after all. And it’s possible that the non-father knew. In the discussion, guys were taken to task for even considering that his rights might trump that of a child, his or otherwise. The welfare of the child trumps all (within reason, which this is).

My general sense of the issue is that both sides do have valid points. The attachment between an adopted child and adopted parent is real. If the law were to state that upon finding out that the child is not biologically his that he loses all custody rights would strike me as fundamentally unfair. The notion that, upon discovering non-paternity, the entirety of the choice of the non-father as to whether to continue or sever the relationship does seem fundamentally unfair to the child, who (support payments aside) has probably grown attached to two parents. It makes what would already be a traumatic experience even worse. All for the sake of allowing a man to save some money.

I should also say that in a good portion of the cases, a man put into this situation would gladly trade support payments for access to his putative son or daughter. Except in particular cases, I strongly believe that is the moral thing to do. Finding out that the child isn’t yours has to be heartbreaking, but your love for him or her should not be fundamentally changed by that fact. Parents love their adopted children all the time.

If I were king, I would probably still like to give the non-father more discretion than he currently has, though. I wouldn’t put all of the responsibility on the purported father to determine whether or not he is the biological dad in a timely fashion or else say that he has lost any right to object being held legally responsible for the mother’s deceit. I’m not sure that I could sign on with automatic paternity testing at birth. I don’t like the idea because of the disruption it would cause when the vast majority of the time there is nothing to be concerned about, but the arguments against it are pretty thin. It would have the benefit of giving the non-father the right, early on, to decide whether or not he wants the role and if he does then he could adopt.

The alternative might be a paternity test requirement prior to payments having to be made in the event of a divorce. In that case, the question of whether or not he knew he was not the biological father and usurped that role anyway (thus making him a party to the lie) could be brought up and if the mother could prove that was the case then he could be left on the hook. But all of that could make a traumatic time in the kid’s life even moreso. “Your father and mother are splitting up. Oh, and your father ain’t your father.”

An argument I reject, though, is the notion that the child support payments should be required on the basis not of fairness (it’s hard to argue that the cuckolded fellow deserves it… though some do make that argument), but rather because that’s what’s in the best interest of the child. It’s an argument that sounds solid (bulletproof, even) at the base of it, but it’s an argument that is frequently jettisoned in the name of practicality. In fact, rather than being based in the moral conviction it’s often clothed in, I think it’s mostly based on pragmatism. Somebody has to help the mother take care of the child. Might as well be this guy.

So when do we ignore the Best Interest of the Child arguments in favor of the rights of the parents? Sperm donation, primarily. And I mostly agree with that. In fact, I think that some of the fundamentals there ought to be expanded to cover other areas, as well. That’s going to be another post.

Addendum: In the comments, Phi points to another conundrum: What if the birth father, kept in the dark, comes back to claim what’s biologically his? This tilts me slightly more in favor of mandatory DNA testing. Ironically, the more I think about it the more the strongest argument in favor of it is “the best interest of the child”. To disrupt these sorts of things from happening down the line, test early. And maybe, at least in cases that don’t involve anonymous adoption and/or sperm donation, the right of the child to know who his or her father is.

Addendum II: Here is a good rundown of the laws in Illinois regarding paternity, custody, and a slew of other issues. I found it very instructive.

I can’t find the post (I held on to the quote below when I found it but stupidly did not save a link), but Capella wrote the following a while back:

I will never see the train people again and therefore will not have to participate in endless debates about whether “a couple hours” is or is not much less than four, the obvious answer being that “a couple” is “two”, and that if you are going to tell someone you will call them and not do so you should be prepared for towering rage.

A “couple” for me actually isn’t two. I mean, I realize that’s the definition, but I consider it an approximation wherein it is more than one, but could be more. In fact, I used to think that couple, except when specifically referencing a male-female paring, did explicitly allow for three. Here are some other definitions I tend to go by:

Couple = 2 or 3 (maybe four)
Few = 3 to 5 (maybe six)
Handful = 4 to 6
Bunch = 6-15 (maybe more, depending on the scope of the reference)
Several = 7 to 9
Ten = 10
Dozen = 11 to 13

What do you guys think when you hear someone make a reference to these quantities?

A lot of people have commented on George Will’s recent commentary on Blue Jeans and the Fall of Western Society. Will was taking points from Daniel Akst’s Down With Denim. No reason I shouldn’t join in, too.

Akst and Will both try to make aesthetic, practical, and cultural points against jeans as the flashpoint of our culture’s inability to dress itself. The problem with this is that aesthetics are valid but subjective, they’re wrong on practicality, and the cultural significance of jeans is no longer what it once was and it doesn’t so much matter what it once was as it does what it presently is.

The real problem with jeans, from a culturally conservative perspective, is their ubiquity. Akst does a pretty good job of pointing this out, but Will mostly misses the boat on it because he just dislikes them so too much to bother coming up with good reasons why. The ubiquity is a problem, though, for the same reason that cultural history is not.

The main point of dressing in particular clothes is that they are signifiers. They tell us something about us and how we view an occasion. If we’re dressing in a suit and tie we are declaring that this is important and that we expect that. If we go to something where a suit and tie is significant, refusing to wear such, we are signaling a rebellion against the code. Or laziness or clueless. How we perceive these clothes clothes are the main cultural point. That jeans used to be an act of rebellion is somewhat irrelevant when it comes to their current application. Jeans currently signal comfort and casualness over formality.

We can expect a conservative like Will to be horrified as such mass displays of casualness. And I’m not unsympathetic. Whether this truly represents a cultural problem is a matter of what we think that culture should be. Those who would prefer a greater degree of formality understandably detest this trend. Similarly, I am discomforted by the increasing trend of girls and young women wearing what seem to be pajama bottoms out in public. Or people that wear sweats everywhere. On the other hand, if 40 years down the line (God help us) everybody is doing these things, the future arguments I have with my future daughter turn to mud.

But we’ve reached the point where jeans’ ubiquity don’t really represent anything at all. We have jeans that are so tight as to be uncomfortable and others that are made too large. Jeans make so little of a statement that you have to sub-signal. The kinds of jeans you make are the statement. Will admits as much when he talks about those jeans that come out 0f the factory looking like they have already been worn. Those are now what represent casualness. Jeans, ironically, now more represent conformity than anything else.

I say this as that guy that never wore jeans in school up until I forced myself in late junior high. For some of the same reasons that Akst gives. They are hot and uncomfortable in the long Delosian summers (spanning from April to October) where I was raised. They always seemed itchy. So when we were banned from wearing shorts to school, I wore slacks. At this point, I was being the rebel. Unfortunately, the kind of rebellion that you pay a social cost for. Will should approve of the fact that I paid a price for bucking convention.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve come around on the jeans front as they pertain to me. In the cool weather up here, they provide a little extra warmth compared to most of the slacks and cargos I wear. Some of the discomfort I experienced when I was younger is gone now, probably due in part to “relaxed fit” jeans that fit my legs better. And I think I got used to the way that they rub against my legs. Now I see the upsides of jeans. They don’t significantly wrinkle. They’re flexible to go with whatever shirt you happen to have handy. Even if it weren’t the norm, it’s probably what I would wear when appropriate.

Of course, some of the things that I like about them are the things that people like Will and Akst don’t. The fact that they’re easy and don’t need to be ironed means that I don’t have to put much effort into it and are thus inferior. It’s the male equivalent to the female need to make dressing as complicated (and uncomfortable) as possible. It shows effort. And, of course, that they go well with anything could be turned around to say that they don’t really go with anything.

I’m sort of sympathetic to that last part. The problem with jeans is the ubiquity. Or at least how jeans symbolize the ubiquity of modern dress. In my perfect world, we would have one type of clothes to wear on our downtime, another to work, another to church, and so on. When I was a kid, I had to dress nicely for church. I objected strenuously. Ties have always been particularly uncomfortable around my big neck, who the heck wants to wear a jacket in the southern heat, and so on. By the time I was graduating from high school and when I would go to church afterward, this custom had relaxed and young people were coming to church in jeans and later {gasp} shorts. I welcomed the development at the time, but now I see what Mom was talking about.

Now we can wear the same clothes to work and church that we might want to wear on the weekend. I feel sort of robbed of the chance to dress like an adult. I don’t dress exactly as I did when I was younger (worse, back then I didn’t wear jeans!), I rarely wear t-shirts, for instance. But I usually dress within a comfortable range. I dress for work wearing the same sorts of things that the janitor wears and the auto guy wears. My employer wouldn’t fire me for wearing a suit-and-tie to work, but the symbols of my progression in life have become pretense. I share with Will and Akst a sense of loss in that.

That is where I do feel a sense of common cause with those scolds. Dressing up and dressing down may be arbitrary cultural dictates, but I do think that such things are important. There’s a reason we don’t dress in togas or African robes, after all. I think that targeting jeans is a big misguided, particularly on the grounds that they do.

On the other hand, if I really want differentiation-in-dress, I guess we do still see that. Most offices (my current withstanding) don’t yet allow employees to show up in shorts and flip-flops. The young girls wearing pajama pants are doing some differentiation of their own, however-much I disapprove and will forbid my future daughters from doing the same. Somehow, I doubt that Akst will approve of this any more than I do. So I guess in that sense I am trapped in the same sort of thinking that they are. A preference for a more classical look losing, day-by-day, in the face of modern culture.

A while back, Kirk made the comment that he wanted a license plate on his car that said “Expect Less” and that was generally his outlook on things. I told him that if I was going to put any bumper sticker on my car (other than the Episcopal Shield, Southern Tech University logo, and Please-don’t-give-me-a-ticket Highway Patrol support sticker) that would be it. I’m not really a bumper sticker sort of guy (except for the above), but I’d put that on there before I’d announce support for a particular political candidate or any other pithy saying.

There are two ways to take that statement, I guess. One empowering and one resigned. Kirk means it in the resigned way. I would mean it in both.

It seems that a lot of people out there expect too much from life. Which is to say that they expect life to give them too much. This isn’t some right-wing rant about people being no longer willing to work for a living, but that’s not what’s intended. I know more people in debt that hold down jobs than I do people that don’t. They’re sort of like that person that thinks that because they spent ten minutes puttering along on an exercise bike that they’ve earned that piece of triple-chocolate cake. Because they’ve worked hard, they deserve whatever it is they see in the window on their drive home. And one of my big pet peeves (and one of the reasons why complaints by young people about how tough they have it) is people that think that since they work for a living and their parents worked for a living that they should be able to afford – right off the bat – the same sort of lifestyle their parents had… ignoring that their parents worked 20-30 years to be able to afford.

This also applies to guys in search for a girlfriend. I pick on guys here not because it’s only men with expectations that are too lofty but because it’s generally men that are expected to do the heavy lifting of securing the date. A lot of the whole Nice Guy Wars boils down to the expectation that if a guy is nice and good that he should have women falling all over him. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not much of one. Guys think that since they’ve earned the right to a girlfriend by doing the things that girls and movies and all say that they should do, that they deserve a particular girl. Such guys often have limited social circles and so they fixate on the one girl that they have access to. When that doesn’t work out (because a pairing between any two specific people usually doesn’t work), they get haughty over being unable to find anyone. Or they take periodic shots in the dark in online personals or random girls on the street. Those are not inclined to work out for a number of reasons, but the expectation with a profile or a response to a profile should magically turn into something enduring because you are nice and sincere is a faulty one.

More broadly, though, I think that people are often unhappy because they expect more. More than whatever it is that they have. Once they have something, they expect more. Despite my best efforts, I’m guilty of this. I go my entire life without something and then once I have it, I want more and more of it. I had no Pocket PCs a half-decade ago. Now between my Pocket PCs and smartphones I don’t even know what to do with them all. I have a ridiculous number of computers. I’m always looking towards building on what I have. That’s not a bad thing in moderation — and I suppose I may be a moderate — but the failure to build on that should never make someone really unhappy. Expecting less – expecting what you have rather than what you are working towards – can be just as valuable to a better life than the constant working for more.

This is all common sense stuff, really. Yet it’s really hard to keep the eye on the ball here. Capitalism is built on notions that run contrary to this. If everyone were suddenly happy with what they had and did not try to get more, our economy would fall apart just as surely as it has now because of so many people standing on a house of cards trying to get more than what they have without earning.

So forget what I said. Expect more.

Be wanting and unhappy.

Our economy depends on it!

-{No, this post is not a serious critique of capitalism. Nor is it an endorsement of any specific political ideology. I’m not sure it even has a point at all. A striking number of things that I say are generally pointless.}-

It’s funny how some people bring out very specific instinctual reactions in us. The whole phenomenon of “love at first site” can be attributed to this. Whether one truly considers it “love” or not, it’s undeniable that certain people bring out very particular reactions well before we have enough information to justify them. Obviously, some “love at first site” cases are just an attempt to add depth to the observation of “Hey, he/she is not”. But I think that it goes beyond that. There have been cases where I have been immediately taken by someone that was not objectively any more or less attractive than people that did not elicit the same reaction.

But what I’ve found since I’ve gotten married and off the market and all that, which is that these sort of instantaneous reactions are everywhere in all sorts of directions.

For example, my personnel manager at work – my contact with the contracting agency I work with – makes me want to hug her. I have no idea why. She would be too old to be a partner if I were single but too young to be an obvious motherly figure. But whenever I talk to her, I want to hug her goodbye. All I can guess is that she unconsciously reminds me of somebody that I used to hug hello and goodbye to. She doesn’t look like anybody in any obvious manner. But subconciously or unconsciously or something, I get some sort of reaction.

A guy that I am sometimes in the smoker’s area with, on the other hand, brings out the exact opposite in me. Wherever he is, I want to be somewhere else. There is something about the guy that I just don’t like. I wondered if it was the fact that he’s a real metrosexual sort, but there are people like that who don’t bother me. Even the transvestite/transsexual (I know the difference, but don’t know which she is) doesn’t send up as many flags. Maybe he sets off some sort of gaydar and I’m not as comfortable around homosexuals as I think I am (I don’t get a whole lot of practice)… but I have no particular reason to think that he’s gay other than how he dresses. It’s just this weird sort of thing where he’s dripping with Trumwill-repellent. Again, I wonder if there’s somebody that he reminds me of.

That all makes me wonder if the whole Love at First Site is really mental shorthand for “You outwardly remind me in some way of somebody that I once developed feelings for”. Love at First Site when you’re young is often shorthand for “Hey, you’re hot”, but when you get older, I wonder if it’s just not an association of sorts with someone that you know and like very much. Maybe not even someone in real life. Maybe a TV character that you became really taken with or something.

I remember a girl in high school that made me think of Gadget from Chip’n’Dale’s Rescue Rangers. I’m not saying that I was taken with her because of that resemblance (cartoon anthropomorphic mice aren’t what I’m into), but maybe the familiarity alone was enough to make me give her a second or third look to notice how attractive she was. I choose that one because it’s by far the most trivial. It’s not just physical resemblance (the girl did not look like a mouse!). It could be posture or some mannerism so subtle that the conscious mind never quite isolates it.

What I find is that these instincts are very, very rarely wrong. Obviously, if I hugged my handler at work I would be sued for sexual harassment, but I would be surprised if she were not a hugger of some sort. Few people that I take an immediate “irrational” dislike for do I end up saying “Oh, hey, she’s okay!” There are cases where I am sorta neutral on someone and later really like them or that I sorta like only to find out that they’re a bad person, but for someone whose gut instincts on all sorts of things lead him awry, that’s one area where it rarely seems to happen.

I have been the recipient of CC’s of at least three great emails in my time. One was forwarded by a young woman who had a romantic admirer that was basically telling her that he could not have her as a part of her life if she was not willing to take things to the next level. She was not willing. The letter wasn’t blackmail or anything like that. It was a statement of fact. I’ve written those before. What stood out about the letter was the degree to which he expressed exasperation adoration for her. He obviously loved every last thing about her. Even and especially the parts he was clearly imagining.

I can’t get into the specifics without presenting the email or reproducing it somehow, but what stands out most is that there is a disconnect between who she was and how he described her. He described her as this magnificent high society type person with a social elegance and standing that he longed for in a woman. He explained that she had this entire world that was full and complete and that he wasn’t a part of it and that it was killing him.

After she forwarded me the email asking for help on a response, I told her, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but he’s so busy worshiping you that he doesn’t seem to know who you are.”

She wasn’t complete without him any more than she would have been complete with him. She had problems. Sure, she liked the opera, but she also liked crummy anime and Matlock and cheesy romance novels. But he didn’t see the earthly parts in her. He papered over them. He invented things to take their place. She wasn’t stupid. She knew who she was and she knew she wasn’t who he apparently thought she was. As flattered as she was by the compliments, and she was, and as much as he was the kind of guy that she might have gone out with at some point, and he was, as long as he held those kinds of lofty views of her, she knew that reality would eventually make its presence known and she had no idea where she would land once it did. She wasn’t partial to making wise romantic decisions, but that was one of them.

She didn’t take what I said the wrong way. She replied, “Totally.”

—-

Capella discusses her college ex-boyfriend:

My college boyfriend, when he was planning his wedding, told me it’s not who you marry but how they make you feel. His fiancee had adopted a stance of worshipfully vacant adoration, combined with forgetting to take her birth control pills, that made him feel like getting married.

I tend to assume everyone is like me, which seems to be a common fallacy. I like men who are smarter than me in some way, whom I can admire, who inspire me. Anecdotal evidence suggests men are more interested in being the object of admiration. I suppose this is complementary and possibly biological, but I prefer when life is symmetric.

I think that there is a bit of difference between being adored and admired. Admired, to me, has stronger roots in the tangible. You are admired for what you have done and maybe for specific attributes you possess. You are adored for the sum of your parts. I admire celebrities. I adored my dog. I say this mostly because this is the terminology I am using throughout the post.

Men, like women, like being adored. Who wouldn’t? But I think that over the longer term there needs to be admiration. Both ways, I would say, for most people. Who wouldn’t want such a thing?

It would be possible to describe my non-relationship with Dharla along these lines. Her adoration of me was one of the things that kept me around even when I was pretty sure I wanted to go. It was immensely flattering, for sure. And it meant a lot more to me because she was one of the more beautiful girls that I dated and was a worthwhile person in many ways (alas, worthwhile in ways that I knew I could not fully appreciate). It really does make you feel good. It’s also very much an insufficient foundation for a relationship. I think it’s also, as with Capella’s ex, the beginnings of an unhappy future if pursued.

The problem with these relationships is not so much assymetry, though that can cause problems. The problem is that such adoration is, as was the case with my friend, unearned. It could be said to be a great deal to get adoration without having to do anything for it, but that which comes from nothing is ultimately reduced to nothing. As tempting as it is to settle down and settle in with someone on the basis that you can do know wrong… we all know that you will, at some people, do wrong. We know that if they never realize this, they’re either blind and stupid or wading through shortcomings of their own that will, unless you’re equally stupid and blind, drive you crazy.

I think a lot of my wife. I admire her a great deal. There are things about her that I adore. The same thing is true of her feelings towards me, I would wager. The difference, though, is that we have each earned one another’s respect. We have proven ourselves worthy of one another’s affections and admirations. It’s not based on some intangible sort of thing. It’s rooted in specific characteristics in a list that I could write right now with footnotes of specific experiences to back it all up. It’s based on things that she has done for me, things I have done for her, and things that we have each done for others.

Our adoration is built on love and admiration. Both are required. Both, in their own way, must be earned. If not at first, then over time. Clancy and I made commitments before we really got there. But we weren’t doing it because of how we felt at the moment. We were, in essence, betting that there was a foundation to it all. Turned out to be a smart bet.

A while back I wrote in irritation about a movie convention wherein the woman leaves the nice, safe (booooring) guy in favor of the character that has been a jerk throughout most of the movie only to see a little glimmer behind that rough exterior which makes him more authentic and virtuous than the man that’s been acting like a good man throughout.

Brandon Berg made the following comment:

I’d argue that the opposite trope—the one where the sensitive new-age beta wins out over the jerky alpha—is equally harmful, because it provides a terrible role model for boys who are confused and trying to figure out how to succeed romantically.

To the extent that one believes that being sensitive is a relationship liability, I would say that the bigger culprit in this are the words of women themselves when they say that all they want is someone nice. I say this but (a) reject the notion that sensitivity is in itself a liability and (b) believe that that any statement that begins in “all I want” in reference to a romantic partner is incomplete at best.

That being said, this reminded me of an area where I think that movies and television do have a detrimental effect on teaching young males the way of the romantic world. One of those things is that being a nice guy and a good friend is (or ought to be) enough for the girl of your dreams to fall for you. But that’s a pretty minor one. The bigger problem is he portrayal of persistence as being a positive attribute.

It’s not an uncommon thing to see in film a young woman won over by the sheer persistence of a young man’s pursuits. Nor is it uncommon for you to see a character harboring an unannounced affection for someone of the opposite sex over a long period of time that (a) remains unnoticed and (b) once a chance is taken, it pays off something big because it turns out that she feels the same way that he does.

In my life I have seen or heard of such things happening. Well, one case. Maybe two depending how you count it. One ended happily. The other did not. At all. But since they did actually date, I guess it counts. But by and large, the notion of persistence as a virtue and of discretion as concealment of feelings are the stuff that restraining orders are made of. The only times that I have really seen a guy keep a wrap on his intense feeling for a girl are when she doesn’t notice his feelings because she barely notices his existence (or the existence of his sexuality). It usually comes across more as a heterosexual variation of this, where the secret-keeper is the last to know that it isn’t really a secret anymore.

But the bigger thing is persistence. I can think of maybe a handful of good things that have ever come from romantic persistence in the fact of rejection or being ignored. In my romantic life, 3/4 of every problem I’ve ever had can be related to persistence. Persistence that kept me interested long after a more rational man would have flamed out. Persistence that made me come across as creepy when I was mostly clueless. Costing me not only the lost cause that was the object of my effections, but of any sort of romantic interest of anybody noticing what the heck I am doing because it would be so impossible notice me without noticing the black hole of patheticism surrounding me.

And this is all from the male perspective! From the female perspective it is arguably worse. At least I can look back and say that I had the opportunity if not the ability to quash my interest. Young women are stuck dealing with these guys bent on the idea that if they just try hard enough and keep coming at her that eventually she will buckle down. They are stuck with the guy that wistfully sighs so audibly loud in her presence that the Archangel Michael’s cat in heaven could hear him, simultaneously being assigned some responsibility for his heartache without having the ability to even confront it. Howeverasmuch I was the prisoner of my delusions, that remains being better than the prisoner of someone else’s delusions.

So I hereby resolve to have every instance of persistence in my writing end up in misery for everybody so as not to convince anybody who reads, watches, or listens to my rhetoric that persistence is ever a good idea.