Clancy and I were talking about baby names the other day. We already have a consensus name if we have a daughter (whenever the time comes, of course). We’re at odds with male names, though. So I was looking up names.

I ran across a couple sites (boys and girls) that had some interesting data on name-frequency rankings. It’s no surprise that you have traditional names that have fallen somewhat into disuse and you have names that came out of virtually nowhere and became prominent. I was curious which names were at the top of each list. So I found a site that has names that keeps track of the most popular names last year, in the last five years, the last twenty-five years, and the last 125 years. The most interesting distinction for me was last 25 vs last 125. I created a spreadsheet and created lists of names that are in the top-100 for the last 125 years and ordered them by what percentage of those occurred in the last 25 years. The list of names will be at the bottom of the post.

I guess it’s no great surprise that female naming is apparently a much more fickle art than male naming. Female names seem much more likely to both suddenly surge and die off. Notably, 13 of the top 100 female names are “dead names”. Only one of male name is dead, and even that name (like one of the 13 female names) may just be on life support because it’s only the last year that it wasn’t used).

The most surprising to me was Jacob, which I don’t associate with being a “trendy name”. I was surprised at the trendiness both ways on Biblical names, which I consider to be more immortal. Part of me would love to dust off some of these unused names. While names like Mildred and Doris seem dated, I don’t see anything inherently wrong with the name Beverly and I think Carol is a fabulous name. Interestingly, prior to even seeing this list, the name Walter was mentioned.

Before I get to the names, a little bit on the limitations of the data. First, only names that made the list are counted. That includes names that are in the top-100 in the last 125 years. I’m sure that there are a lot of dead names that were never as big as the ones listed. Similarly, there are obviously names now that did not exist 25 years ago. So it’s a limited sample. And it’s a bit outdated. By “last year”, I mean 2004. The last five years encompasses 1999-2005. And so on. Lastly, these names are spelling-specific. So a name like Theresa takes a hit because it competes with Teresa. Catherine has three spellings, which dilutes its significance. The dead names are names that have not been used in the last five years. Names that have not been used in the last year are also listed, but with an asterisk.

The trendy male names: Tyler (96.5%), Zachary (94.3%), Austin (92.5%), Brandon (89.1%), Jacob (87.4%), Kyle (86.41%), Justin (85.4%), Joshua (84.8%), Ryan (80.1%), and Nicholas (78.9%).

The dying male names: Fred (2.38%), Harold (3.03%), Ralph (3.42%), Howard (3.59%), Harry (3.63%), Earl (4.3%), Clarence (4.43%), Eugene (4.98%), Walter (5.53%), and Stanley (5.95%).

The dead male name: Fred*

The trendy female names: Brittany (99%), Ashley (96.9%), Samantha (91.3%), Lauren (88.9%), Megan (88.9%), Amber (84.3%), Jessica (83.5%), Amanda (77.9%), Danielle (77.6%), and Emily (76.9%)

The dying female names: Florence (.09%), Mildred (.14%), Lois (.2%), Doris (.68%), Betty (.72%), Joan (.9%), Dorothy (1.16%), Jean (1.31%), Shirley (1.48%), Carol (1.86%)

The dead female names: Florence, Mildred, Lois, Doris, Betty, Joan, Jean, Judy, Debra, Beverly, Cheryl, Tammy, Lori*

A little while back, Megan McArdle wrote a post that I mostly agree with about the social power of shame. I’ve been unpacking the subject in my mind over the last week or so and am going to share some of my thoughts. I’ll be writing a few posts, but they’re not really related enough to be called “Parts”, but rather looks at the limitations of shame as a tool.

The first was brought out by the original post that McArdle was responding to. Andrew Serwer. Serwer makes the valid point that shame often pushes those that have already done wrong to continue to do wrong. It has limited utility as a corrective sometimes. They internalize the fault or frequently rebel ever-more-loudly against whatever norm it is that they are accused of breaking. Or they commit another wrong in hopes of two wrongs making a right.

McArdle’s counter is that shame may not be a good corrective, but it is helpful to get people to avoid going bad to begin with. Serwer and McArdle are both right to an extent, and that’s really the tension that exists when it comes to enforcing social norms. Or one of the tensions, at any rate.

A young woman that is lead to feel truckloads of shame at getting pregnant in her teenage years out of wedlock is a young woman to whom abortion seems a particularly attractive option. She can make the stigma go away! A young man that made some mistakes with a criminal record that follows him around for the rest of his life has difficulty getting on track and is more likely to rely on crime in the future. I’m not saying that in each of these cases a strong enough person wouldn’t be able to attack the adversity heads-on. I’m just saying that from a practical standpoint, they’re less likely to succeed.

At the same time, you simply can’t just toss up your hands in the air and say that all social stigma is bad. It’s not. Avoiding social condemnation has proded me into doing the right thing at all sorts of points when I was too stupid or misguided to do the right things for the right reasons. It’s true for all sorts of people. Fear of disappointing those whose opinions matter to you — the dreaded negative reinforcement that Serwer swears doesn’t work — is a necessary component of any society that doesn’t have to make every discouraged behavior prohibited.

So when should shame be used? Are there any strict criteria? None that I can think of. I think that it’s one of those things that has to be approached on a case-by-case basis. Unfortunately, concepts as nebulous as social disapproval are extremely difficult to pin down and get everybody to agree on. On the one hand you have people that frankly use shame as a boost to themselves rather than as a useful social tool. People that could justify calling the kid a fat booger-face by saying that he’s bringing attention to the importance of personal hygiene and physical fitness. Then on the other hand you have people that seem to believe that if you just leave everyone to their own moral devices that they will naturally discover what is right.

And even in the middle, we don’t really know what we’re doing. Parents who want nothing but the best for their children fumble on when and how to apply negative reinforcement in the form of outspoken disapproval all the time. Most are wrong in both directions at once, being too approving when the best approach would be to condemn and condemning when the best approach would be something else. Sometimes the right answer for one person is the wrong for the next even in the exact same situation.

So what’s a society to do?

Phi’s Alpha/Beta post on Jane Austen reminds me of something else I’ve touched on in the past but want to bring up again.

I have a real pet peeve about some romantic comedies (or just comedies with some romance thrown in there cause every movie has got to have it) that can be contorted to fit within the alpha/beta paradigm: Girl is with good, safe guy. Girl meets (or becomes reacquainted with) roguish guy with a rough exterior but a good heart. Guy eventually wins over girl. Audience cheers. Trumwill fumes.

The fact that the first guy is outwardly stable and makes an effort to be pleasant and forthright and honest apparently counts for nothing. The fact that the buttmunch who is a jerk throughout significant stretches of the movie has a glimmer of a good sign to him is super-duper meaningful. The fact that the first guy lacks charisma is evidence that he is unworthy of her. The fact that the other guy lacks class is evidence of… nothing. The calico that toys with the dead mouse is a monster, but the puma whose tail looks like it’s sorta wagging is kind of cute, isn’t it? I’m never good at coming up with examples off-the-fly, but a few examples are below the fold at the end of the post.

What’s a bit interesting in retrospect, though, is how anxious I am to see myself in the position of the fellow getting dumped. In the years since I developed this distaste for this cinematic convention, I’ve discovered that things are a bit more complicated than that. I have been the unhealthy distraction as often as I’ve been the safe harbor being left for exciting waters. I’ve been the guy left for instead of the guy left from. But in those early says, I mostly saw myself in the guy being left because that was what my role in life was at the time. The jerk wins the girl. The nice guy gets the shaft. Whatever I may have in common with the lovable rogue and whatever I may lack in common with the nice guy getting dumped, it was the latter who was my soul-brother.

(more…)

Phi has a worthwhile post on Beta-hatred and Jane Austen. It’s difficult to quote any of it without quoting all of it, but the crux is that in the course of the novel, Elizabeth Bennett rejects the advances of the oafish-but-earnest Mr Collins. When Elizabeth finds out that her friend is going to marry Collins, she hits the roof and all but threatens to disown her friend. She doesn’t merely reject Collins herself, but rejects the very notion that Collins is worthy or capable of finding happiness with or providing happiness to anyone.

It is, in short, the perfect example of the hatred that women have for men that do not fit a certain charismatic type or exude a certain presence.

I have a few thoughts on the subject, most that I will share here and one unrelated enough that it gets its own post.

What strikes me about the above situation is that it plays muchly on my paranoid fears but doesn’t jibe with my experience.

On the fear front, it’s never been the case that I have asked out two female friends. I was never good at asking out anybody, but this was unofficial policy. My speculation was that if I asked out Girl A and she said no, there was no way in tarnation Girl B would consider going out with me. Why would she stoop to a level below her friend? My assumption is that Girl A and Girl B and Girl C and Girl D sat around talking about me and how pathetic it is that I had this crazy idea that Girl A might go out with me that whatever nascent interest Girl B, C, or D might have had in my dissipated when she had to laugh at me with everyone else due to the social protocols of girl-talk, which can involve nothing if not talking up hot guys and talking down everybody else.

Guys do this. A guy that is dumped by his good friend is not likely to be asked out for a variety of reasons, but one of which is the fear of “sloppy seconds”. To go out with someone that our friend dumped is to suggest that we are worthy of their left-overs. It’s a pretty brutal way to look at it, and I don’t think that it would prevent us from asking out someone that we were really enthralled with, but absent that enthrallment guys do pay attention to these things. Hubert was in a relationship with an attractive young lady who is exactly the type I would have asked out under a lot of circumstances, but since he dumped her (that was the story, anyway), it was never going to happen. What’s funny, though, is that despite all of these gears turning behind our eyes, I don’t think that I would ever denigrate someone for dating someone that I dumped. I was pleased as punch for Tony when he took up with my ex-girlfriend Julie.

So a lot of this can be chalked up to paranoia.

Paranoia aside, though, the above behavior of Elizabeth Bennett doesn’t really seem to fit. Historically, when I’ve made my interest known to somebody that didn’t reciprocate, they’ve been nothing if not thrilled to see me interested in and/or partnering with someone else. By-and-large, few young ladies that rejected me (after the Original Nine, at any rate) actually wished me any ill. Most of the Original Nine didn’t give me enough care to wish me ill. I suspect most wished me well. Or at the very least wished me out of their hair, which my interest in someone else accomplished pretty nicely.

It’s possible that they were outwardly kind while quietly sabotaging any attempts I made at finding romance and happiness, but that doesn’t entirely square, either. I’ve been the friend and confidant of many (ahem… too many) young ladies in my life. They’re rarely hostile to guys asking them out. They really don’t seem to go out of their way to say awful things about them. There’s no real tactful way to say this, but when they do go out of their way to run-down the guy, he’s often got it coming. Sometimes he’s actually a nice guy, but his dealings with her have brought out the petty and embittered parts of his personality that make his behavior towards her seem manipulative and/or antagonistic.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. I think that most of the above is true because, apart from the Original Nine, I have generally asked out nice and good people. If I went around throwing myself at people that were not that way or if I’d befriended them and listened to them prattle on… well then the story might be different.

So in that vein, it could well be said that Collins’s problem is that he was interested in Bennett in the first place.

Sheila Tone has an interesting post on Econoholic about Nadya Suleman, otherwise known as the Mother O’Eight:

Come on sisters, where are all your usual snide remarks about “clown car vaginas?”

The difference is that Nadya Suleman is a single mother on public assistance. So we’re not allowed to be mean to her. If she were a married fundie like the Duggar mom (deft switcheroo, Richaro) she’d be fair game.

Why the hostility? Perhaps it’s because the married, employed Tones are in the process of carefully planning our second, and last, child. We have a 30-month-old. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I want to be a mother, if and why I’d want a second child. And, oh yes, I spend a lot of time working. And a lot of time soul-searching. What’s my purpose in life? Am I a worthy human being? Having a kid turned up those voices, and added “Am I a worthy parent?” to the chorus.

I had to work hard to find which portion to blockquote. Read it all. I chose that portion because it gets to the nub of one of the things that interests me most about this discussion, which is to say the difference in reaction to different situations. Some liberals are saying that if Suleman were a Christian couple like the Duggars, they’d be applauded as the Duggars are. That this is really a classist issue and, owing to Nadya’s last name, possibly a racist one.

But Sheila points out that there are a number of differences between the Duggars and Ms Suleman. Which is one of the things that bothers me about the sort of “If circumstances were different, you’d be saying something different” gotcha attitude that infects blogs from to time. Yes, when circumstances are different, people render judgment. That Suleman will not be remotely able to care for her children, as the Duggars do, makes it something of a different situation. That Suleman used technology and had them all at once – which increases risks to their health and makes caring for them more difficult – matters. There are plenty of reasons to approve of the Duggars and disapprove of Suleman. There are fewer reasons to do the inverse. Those reasons usually come down to “But they’re icky Christians!” and that the Duggars will inflict bad ideas into their kids (this is, of course, in marked contrast to the wonderful ideas that Suleman will pass on… if she has time to).

Truthfully, though, I don’t approve of either the Duggars or Suleman. I don’t know what the “right” maximum number of kids to have is, but it’s clearly fewer than fourteen. An acquaintance of mine, the second of seven, said that once you reach five or so you start running into a situation where the older siblings raise the younger siblings. So on one hand, that seems a good a place as any. It could be said that helping to raise a sibling could be a learning experience for the older siblings, but from my mother’s stories on raising her sisters they can often lose more than they gain from the proposition.

Clancy and I have talked a bit about the Suleman situation. She takes something of a harder line. I feel sorry for Suleman, though I should note that I feel sorry for her at a comfortable distance wherein I am not affected by her actions and compassion is extremely easy. Clancy, like Sheila, has to deal with the consequences of irresponsible behavior every day at work. And as a woman, Clancy (like Sheila) has had a lifetime of experience trying to do the responsible thing in terms of procreation and is less inclined to have much sympathy for someone so clearly reckless. Objectively, it’s hard to disagree with her.

I am a little softer on irresponsible reproduction than are Sheila and my wife. I do see a sort of right-of-reproduction (God willing) in at least a limited fashion. The first child because of the right to reproduce and the second because children need siblings. Had Suleman had the octuplets because she desperately wanted a child, couldn’t afford multiple attempts and so stocked up on her single attempt, and had a moral reason not to abort… I might be willing to chalk it up as an epic lapse in judgment rather than a lapse in morals. But that she already had six that she was not able to take care of on her own and thus knew that she was enlisting her parents in something they didn’t want makes me disinclined to forgive any further pregnancies because her tubes should be tied.

I noticed on the news that they’re investigatinng the fertility clinic, which is something that Clancy and I have been discussing. There aren’t laws, but there are (obviously ignored) guidelines that if followed prevent this sort of nonsense. If there is a positive result in all this, hopefully it is a clamping down on this to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. We shouldn’t even have to be discussing this because it shouldn’t be legally permissible (assuming that it is).

Addendum: Sheila has followed up with a post on three ways to discourage welfare mothers.

A while back I discovered* the site Why Women Hate Men, which is a guy collecting the worst of the worst advertisements on dating sites that range from stunningly inept to extremely offensive. It’s a fun site. While reading it, I read the entire comment thread on a post that involved a man sending an email to a woman telling her not to mention the fact that she has a PhD on her ad because it’ll scare men off.

To the extent that there is a consensus in the comment thread, it is: Yes, men have a problem with smart women, but it’s their problem. All sorts of women have stories about how some relationship or another didn’t work out because he was threatened by her intelligence and some women suggest that their intelligence is why they have had difficulty landing a man. And how unwise it is of men to have the priorities that they do.

What this reminds me of, of course, is the whole perpetual Women Dig Jerks discussion. In one case, you have women declaring what men are really attracted to (they’re intimidated by intelligence, thus attracted to stupidity). In the other case, you have men declaring what women are really attracted to (they prefer jerks, which means they stiff nice guys). In both cases there are suggestions that it’s the priorities of the opposite gender that are the reason that they are alone. In both cases, they’ve all got stories to back up their perspective. And in both cases, it doesn’t matter what the side being talked about says because their “revealed preferences” don’t make their “stated preferences.”

I think that the comparison is valuable because the perceptions (regardless o the veracity of each) are held up by a rather similar set of pillars:

These comparisons are inexact, but you get the idea. It doesn’t take a whole lot of truth to provide support for someone to believe something that makes them look good. It’s not a tough sell to convince a guy that he has been rejected because he is too nice nor a girl because she is too smart. Especially when you start involving ideology with anti-feminism as a function of the first and anti-patriarchy as a function of the latter.

I’m not going to venture a guess as to how frequent it is that intelligence hurts a woman and kindness hurts a guy. In a vacuum, it’s unlikely that either hurts either, at least when it comes to more than impersonal hookings-up. Women with degrees are more likely to marry than women without them. Convicts don’t have good marriage rates. I do suspect that (1) is more frequently true in the intelligence context than the kindness one but that (2) goes the other way. Really, I have no evidence for any supposition. I think the more important thing to take away is that even when you think you know what’s up, things are often a lot more complicated.

* – I discovered this site through Phi, who apparently discovered it through somewhere that he went from here.

When I was younger, it seemed like none of my friends were ever going to actually get married. I even developed an elaborate theory as to why things were being set up in a way that were inconducive to happy marriage down the road. The thinking was that we start looking for a partner in our late teens. The thing about our late teens is that there is frequently a buffer between us and the consequences of our actions. Other than schooling, we have no particular reason to be forward-looking. We’re not looking for a life partner so much as we’re looking for someone short term. Except that we fool ourselves into thinking that the relationships we enter are about something Really Serious and we trick ourselves into thinking that these relatively unserious things are what serious things are made of. These perverse incentives lead us to often match up with the wrong people. Then these priorities become reinforced by our actions and the frivolous desires of teenagers become our priorities as adults.

I do think that there’s something to the theory. I think that the desires that exist in the void that is high school (and slightly before and after) carry on a lot longer than they should. I could possibly even write the novel that I had built around the entire concept. The thing is, though, that the characters would have to be in their mid-twenties, younger, or only a little older. Much to my astonishment, reality did not unravel the way that my theory would have predicted it would. Something, and it’s hard to say what exactly, changes in late twenties and thirties.

Most of my friends and former lady-friends, even the ones that I had my doubts would ever get married, are either married now or are in a relationship that appears to be leading up to marriage. In fact, there seems to be little difference in the fates of those that were serious about relationships during the Usually Lost Years of post-adolescence and those that spent that time making one extremely stupid decision after another. Serious-minded Julie is still single, but erratic Evangeline is not. Serious-minded Dave and Hubert married, but so did more adventurous Kyle and Neverlander Clint may as well be married.

Though I was ostensibly serious during my younger dating days, I was extremely unwise in a lot of my romantic choices. I wasted time with relationships that obviously weren’t going anywhere and ran away from some with grand possibilities. Though I did want to find something serious and sustaining, you could only tell that from my actions about half of the time.

I briefly dated a girl several years ago named Carla Brooks. It was apparent from pretty early on that Carla was more in to me than I was in to her. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her, but she didn’t really jump out at me and I had a lot else going on in my life at the time. So I cut her loose and that was that. The funny thing, looking back at all that, is how similar Carla was to the woman that I eventually married. And in the ways that they differed, it was Carla that I had more in common with. So why did I cut loose from one and marry the other? Some of it may be chemical reaction that’s always so hard to pin down. Some of it, though, simply has to do with age. Had Clancy and I met when Carla and I did, it’s far less likely that things would have worked out. If Carla had met me when Clancy did, we probably would have lasted longer than we did whether we would have ended up together or not.

Evangeline went haplessly from one guy to another in rapid succession for nearly a decade. Her relationships weren’t short, necessarily, but they were almost never peaceful. It was all about emotional and intensity. But she ended up marrying a quite unexciting fellow. Julie, on the other hand, was very serious with the guy before me, with me, and with the guy after me (Tony), but hasn’t been in a serious relationship for a couple of years now and doesn’t appear to be really interested in getting into one.

Some of this makes me wonder if there really isn’t something to the whole “sewing wild oats” theory. I think that one of the changes that Evangeline and I went through was simply being tired of the struggle as we entered out mid-to-late twenties. We wanted something that actually made us happy. We didn’t need to feel some sort of grand intensity to know that we were alive and we didn’t need to feel the intensity directed towards us to know that we were valuable. The signs of love, outgoing and incoming, were somewhat revealed for the illusions that they were. Things like the ability to get through an argument and to trust one another became much more important than how much they viscerally excite us. And in a way everything turns on its head: With stability comes the ability to love more freely without fear.

Clint was in a relationship inside which he had sex with more women than he’d had prior to the relationship’s formation. That could be a stunning warning sign to a woman not to get involved with him, but since then he’s not come close to cheating on any of his girlfriend’s since. Some of his previous exploits can be explained by his dissatisfaction with the girl, but some of it can be described as “Been there, done that” and knowing the trouble that such behavior brings and the peace that finding something that works does.

I think everybody’s story is different. The overarching point, though, is that when people are ready to grow up, they seem to know exactly what to do. They know what qualities to look for and what qualities that attract them that they should be suspicious of. They stop trying to look for “the best that they can do” based on some criteria (that usually involves the bad traits from The Usually Lost Years) and find the person that they are the happiest with. They learn not to create unmanageable tension where there is none. To focus on making a relationship work. And being happy.

That’s not to say that everybody makes this transition. Some people never do grow up. Some have been grown up all their lives but have not successfully found a partner. Or they do everything right and then fate hands them the wrong person to do everything right with. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see how exactly it is that people with such bad relationship habits actually grow up to get married. It’s been an interesting sight.

I was all excited when I got a newsletter thing from Amazon that said:

BIG BOOT SALE!

Cause I have big feet and need big boots and it’s so rare that big boots are on sale.

You’ve probably figured out the error in my thinking. They meant that the boot sale was big, not that it was a sale for big boots. That reminded me that the English language really needs to become more mathematical. In math, you can group things together easily so that you know what’s referring to what. So for instance, you could make it:

(BIG BOOT) SALE!

or

BIG (BOOT SALE)!

This is actually one case where Pointless Quotation Marks, which usually drive me nuts, could be helpful. That way it could be:

“BIG BOOT” SALE!

or

BIG “BOOT SALE”!

That way I won’t get my hopes up about getting a good deal on something to take care of my large feet.

You know how some men complain about how difficult it is to find the right girl? They complain that all of the girls are spending their time going after “alpha males” or “outlaw bikers” or the like? Here’s what really happens:

The guy went through grade and middle schools in the lower social classes. They may have had friends, but they were mostly fellow outcasts or, at the least, were mostly devoid of popular people. This is important because it meant that that they lacked female friends. The upper castes tend to either have co-ed tribes or otherwise have corresponding pools of guys and girls similar to that of a fraternity and its sister sorority. This is important because it means that they had somewhat limited exposure to women. That girl who sits next to them who borrows pencils from him or even that girl that smiles back in the hall when he smiles at her doesn’t count. Nor does it count just because he got a girl to sign his yearbook. She probably just wrote “have a great summer” or “thanks for the pencil” or maybe “stay sweet” for lack of anything better to say.

What happened in late junior high or maybe high school is that he started asking girls out. He didn’t do a very good job of this. He asked out girls that were way out of his league. Girls that lead him on by smiling back at him in the halls, borrowing a pencil, or signing his yearbook. After failing at this, he may have asked out girls that were a lot less attractive than the ones that he asked out before. The problem is that he never really went to the trouble of getting to know these girls, getting them to sign his yearbook, or much of anything else. Why waste the effort? Just take shots in the dark. Suddenly, they’re hurt, too.

The exacts vary from individual to individual, but the important part of this is that it all put him on the wrong track. He fell further and further behind in his ability to deal with female-types. When he later made real live female friends, this was quite an advance and he figured that he was finally out of it all. So he started trying to inch up closer to them. Some were girls that tolerated him at best. Others may have said yes, but somewhere along the line he heard that it’s good to make friends with girls first and then ask him out and he mistook unloading his problems on her as friendship and the problems that he unloaded made him less attractive because nobody likes being around a whiner. In fact, he probably considers the fact that he listens to her whines as a debt accrued on her part to be repaid by later romance.

Again, the details vary somewhat, but the refrain is all the same. Over and over again, he puts himself in situations where he is not an attractive partner. When these situations blow up, he gets increasingly embittered. This results in his becoming less attractive because nobody wants to be with a downer. As he gets more desperate he may be willing to if it means being with somewhat that he is otherwise attracted to, but he comes up with the expectation that a woman should be willing to do the same for a man that she is not particularly attracted to.

Things descend further when he finds out that because someone else is down does not mean that they believe that being with another downer, or something that they are not attracted to, will alleviate their predicament. Some guys might take this as a sign that they should improve themselves to the point that they are not a downer or that they should be valuable in more respects than merely being a consolator. Some have amazing minds that help them figure this out. Some stumble on the answer. Others, though, do neither.

Instead, they come to the conclusion that the problem is that the girl that signed his yearbook doesn’t realize that her broken heart at the hands of somebody else means that she needs to find someone that would never break her heart. Not coincidentally, he means himself. So really, it’s their fault for not wanting to be with him. They’re the problem and he is not.

The embitterment becomes more entrenched in his psyche and the cycle perpetuates. He becomes increasingly misogynistic and his misogynism makes finding romance increasingly less likely, which makes him more misogynistic and so on. More and more of his interactions with women become about partnering up. Girls become ever more uncomfortable around him. The witches. And before they know it, they’re in their thirties, mostly devoid of serious relationships (except with people roughly as angry and generally screwed up as they are… I don’t need to tell you how successful those relationships are) and he ends up in the dark world of his own anger and proclaimed blamelessness.

And that is why so many men have trouble finding women.

It’s kind of a neat and tidy story, isn’t it? You see, it’s really the guys fault that he never found love. In fact, any guy that doesn’t find love is to blame becuase he spent all of his time pursuing the wrong women! If he stopped aiming too high and stopped being so mean, everything would work out. But he didn’t so they didn’t. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of nice girls out there end up without guys because so many guys are inflicted with this bitterness.

The problem is that the above strictly applies to relatively few men. A lot end up without partners for entirely different reasons. They reasonably chose women that they seemed well-suited for and things did not work out because of her own dark world of anger. Or he simply had an unconventional personality that made it difficult to find women that would appreciate it.

This is the problem I have with the whole meme that women end up alone because they are hung up with getting “alpha males” or because they are fixated with jerks. There are women to whom this applies, just as their are men to whom the above applies, but it’s dismissive of a lot of people’s loneliness on the basis of the worst archetypes. It assumes that people of the other that are in pain deserve it while your own comrades are victims.

The solution, to the extent that there is one, is to try to modify one’s own behavior. This is much more difficult than blaming the other gender, but in the end it’s what is most likely to produce results. I’m not huge into kharma, but it is my experience that what you bring into the dating market is what you get out of it. I don’t mean this strictly in the sense of bitterness but also in terms of how serious you are about finding a partner. I’ve found that people that are looking for serious relationships figure out what to look for and find, if not serious relationships, people that are looking for them (which greatly increases their likelihood of finding it). People that look for relationships for the sake of alleviating pain tend to find other people looking to alleviate pain. That rarely makes for good relationships or, for that matter, relationships at all.

My glasses are not so rose-colored as to suggest that happiness is purely an inside job. My wife’s presence in my life has made me happier in very real ways. Had I not found her, and had certain other prospects not worked out, it’s quite possible that I would be unhappy right now. The same goes for my wife. Where we succeeded and others failed, besides in simply finding the right person, was that we were both, when we met, prepared to be happy. We weren’t just hoping for it or pleading for it. We were ready for it. We knew it when we saw it. We were ready to work to preserve it when we found it.

They say that luck is merely preparation meeting opportunity. A lot of people spend all their time seeking out opportunity which usually leads to tragedy. Some people find preparation but never opportunity and that is inherently tragic. I wish I had more advice on the opportunity front but that was the part that I was always bad at. Fortunately, before I got really lucky with that, I avoided the above cycle and got a handle on the preparation part.

-{I tried to write a post putting my thoughts together on something Bob wrote a few months ago, but I couldn’t find a way to say anything that I hadn’t already said in the comments. So this post consists primarily of slightly modified nuggets of Trumwisdom from that thread}-

In my experience, guys that befriend a girl and are afraid to ask the girl out are usually justified in their fear of rejection. They’re just prolonging the feeling of not being sure that it’s not going to happen compared to the next most likely alternative (which, needless to say, is not “it happening”).

Guys should be honest with themselves about whether or not they are befriending them for the sole pupose of getting together. The best way to do this (in my experience) is to ask him or herself “Would I still want to be this close if she met the man of her dreams and were married to tomorrow?”.

On at least a couple of occasions I “befriended” someone with the sole intention of getting together romantically with them. I wasn’t exactly sneaky about it, though, as they knew how I felt and knew that simply being friends wasn’t an option to me.

The issue arose when she wanted to put me on the “friend” shelf for future consideration. That can sound like a good deal, though in my experience it isn’t (for the interested, anyway). Once you get put there and it’s determined that you’re fine there (at least for the time being) and that you’re interested, you get put in permanent reserve status for when there’s no one else available to them. Then, when that moment comes, you are seen as this dreadful comprimose candidate and she will do anything to avoid having to “settle” for you.

Some women insist that the “Friend Zone” doesn’t exist, but it does at least in the above incarnation. Sometimes people think that they’re in the FZ when they’re really in the Wasnevergonnahappen Zone, but sometimes not. It’s difficult to tell the difference sometimes.

Being just friends with a girl you’re interested in is more problematic. Your interest in your friend becomes apparent to girls that you meet through them. The facts that they don’t want to be a second choice and the fact that one of the earliest things they know about you is that you’ve been rejected are not fertile ground for a relationship.

The second thing, which happened to me but only when I was younger so I would probably do better with it now if I were dating, is that you can become quite resentful of their efforts to shuffle you off to someone else. You view the recommended friend of the friend as a second choice and can find flaws that you wouldn’t be looking for in other circumstances.

Some of this depends on how interested in them you are. If it’s a mild interest, it’s great to just be friends. I was interested in a girl once and was rejected, but I asked her out early enough in the process that I was able to let it go pretty swiftly and became involved in her social group (without being known as “The Guy Who Digs X”, which is important).

I don’t see any problem with wanting to be with someone romantically and not wanting to be friends with them and don’t necessarily see that as indicative of a problem. Or at least it’s much less a problem to insist to yourself that you should be friends around someone that it hurts to be around. To be friends with someone that you are attracted to romantically can make it extremely difficult to be comfortable around them. Comfort is a key ingredient to friendship.

Noteworthy in that two of the three above instances that come to mind, they did become romantically interested in me… but only after I extricated myself from these lives and after it had been long enough that I lost my position in her life as a hanger-on. So it’s sort of a catch-22. You only get it after you’ve accepted that you can’t have it and moved on. Another way of looking at it is that you only get a shot after you can take some time to reload or the old saying that she can only miss you if you’re always there.

It seems to me that in general, one of the bigger problems here is the carrying of a torch as it becomes larger and larger without confronting it before it becomes a forest fire.

That’s one of the problems with the LJBF thing when combined with the possibility that things could change or that things could have been different (if they could have been different, they could have changed in the future)… it means that a guy can’t entirely put the flame out and it’s hard to keep such things minimized but alive.

It’s also the problem for guys that are interested in a woman but hover around too much waiting for the right time to make their move. Their feelings can sometimes grow way out of proportion and it complicates things and makes sure that the right time never comes (or at least greatly reduces the likelihood of it). It’s also why it’s dangerous to be attracted to someone that’s with someone else, even if you don’t think their current relationship is permanent. In fact, just about any situation where you give yourself too much time to build up your feelings and desires without being able (or willing) to act on them is a recipe for a meldown.