Phoebe Maltz wrote an interesting piece a while back about how, despite all of the advances that women have made and are trying to make, there is at least one area where there is absolutely no movement:

Even for those against a traditional definition of marriage, who think dating bills should be split, that both parties should work outside the home, and that both parties should be allowed to be of the same sex, the notion that (among straights, obviously) the man must do the proposing has, it seems, gone nowhere. Even the NYT, home of the librul media elites, features Vows videos, one after the next, of ‘when he popped the question.’ We could look at this as a quaint and harmless tradition, were it not for the increasingly common situation of women towards the end of their potential childbearing years essentially ‘waiting for the boy to call.’

To examine this, it helps to go back a stage, to the who-asks-who-out. From ample anecdotal evidence, amongst my fellow heterosexuals, relationships tend to work out better when it’s the man who does the asking. This is because, when a woman asks, she will doubt the man’s interest for the duration of the relationship. If he liked her, why didn’t he ask her out?

This is one of those areas where I’m progressive in theory but conservative in fact. It’s sort of like how a woman should be free to ask out a man at any point, the statement that she makes by cutting against that particular grain is problematic. The women who do cut against that grain often poorly represent women as a whole. Not because they bucked the norm specifically, but the same attributes that freed her from cutting against that norm can sometimes also cut against other norms that are more useful. It’s been generally true in my life that people that are inclined to follow good social norms are also predisposed to follow bad ones. People that buck bad norms also often buck good ones. Still. If I were asked out by a girl that came across as uncrazy, I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes if it was someone that I could be interested in. Another worry would be that the woman might come across as domineering. This is of course totally unfair, but as I mentioned a couple paragraphs ago it is not unfounded. Women that have the gumption to ask men out are often more aggressive in general.

From the girl’s point of view, though, it’s a lot more problematic. It’s not just a matter of lingering doubts on her part. The problem is that there are a lot of men that will, if asked out, say “yes” and think, with all the cogency of Beavis & Butthead, “Heh, heh, she wants to jump my bones.”

Or if there thinking isn’t that crude, the fact will cross a lot of men’s minds that “Hey, she likes me! I won’t even have to try!” It’s a stereotype but true that men are often at their best when they’re put in the position of having to prove themselves. Men are more inclined than women to do as little work as they need to in order to get the job done.

Of course, all of these problems could be solved if more women in general asked more men out in general. You wouldn’t have the skewed representative sample. Men would learn that being asked out is not a proposition for easy sex and that yes, they will have to try in that relationship just as they would in any other. Men can be kind of dense so it would require several failures before it gets through their thick skulls what the deal is. Right now they don’t get enough experience with it to discern the patterns. So to get it so that women that do ask out men are not to be considered doormats, crazy, cavalier, or aggressive, more women will have to voluntarily have to put their neck out and have that assumed about them to start bucking the trend. Any takers?

As a brief aside, it seems that from the comment section on Phoebe’s blog and elsewhere that some women really underestimate the difficulty of it all from the male point of view. It’s one thing to think hypothetically “I should ask him out” but it’s another to actually do it. Someone suggested that under the current regime men get the best that they can do and women get the worst. Not true. Women are asked out by men that they’d never have the courage to ask out. Men fail to ask out girls that would probably say yes. It’s all strategic in ways that a lot of guys are not good at strategy. I do prefer the male role in things and think that we do slightly have the better end of things, but only slightly. It’s possible, though, that in a society in which men and women do the asking in roughly equal measure that it will become less painful for everybody involved. Being asked out on a regular basis would likely give men some insight on what to do and what not to do. Not to say that the approachment would be the same, but there would be lessons to learn. I think that men’d also be more understanding of the terrible position it is to be asked out by someone that you think is a pretty nice person but that you don’t want to date and women’d would get a better understanding of why men become embittered with constant rejection (even a man that is not desperate and lonely faces rejection with startling regularity).

Now on to the main thrust of Pheobe’s post, which is marriage proposals. I think that this is something just too ingrained to have any prayer of changing. The cultural norms tell us precisely what is going on when the man proposes. Particularly if he’s on one knee with a ring box in his hand. I think that if a woman asks a man to marry him, he doesn’t automatically know whether it’s a knee-and-ring situation or just putting out feelers. One of the more humiliating experiences in my ex-girlfriend Julie’s life was when she thought she was proposing to her then-boyfriend Tony and he thought that she was putting out feelers or otherwise outright joking. On the other hand, my friend Dave Linas’s wife proposed to him and it worked out fine.

Despite the formal knee-and-ring tradition, I do think that the process of proposing has become more egalitarian. My oldest brother Ollie proposed to his first wife at her request and my older brother Mitch and his wife Brynne decided together to get married. The actual proposal was, in both cases, a formality. Clancy and I didn’t have any formal discussion on the matter, but I constructed a pretty straightforward way of determining whether it was something that she was open to and ready for. I think the days of popping the question in a way that’s anything more than momentarily shocking are passing. I think that women are in general a lot more emboldened to needle if not outright ask. And I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with the tradition of the man outright asking.

That brings me to Phoebe’s original post, which inspired the one above. She asks the question:

Why, if a woman asks for marriage, is it an “ultimatum,” and if a man asks, pure romance?

The short answer is that if a woman says “no” it doesn’t necessarily end in a break-up. Phoebe says it should, but I’m not so sure. If I proposed and was told “no” with the inflection that more time was needed and not that she didn’t want to marry me, I wouldn’t view that as the end. It would certainly be a blow to my self-esteem and could cripple the relationship, but wouldn’t necessarily. An ultimatum, by its definition, would.

In some ways, though, the ultimatum is the much more fair way and it definitely shouldn’t be viewed as “nagging”. A man can pop the question to a clueless woman and really put her on the spot. As I said above, it seems more frequently than not it’s discussed, but it’s not necessarily so. And if the man does so choose to break things off after she says “no”, he’s heartbroken and more likely to get sympathy. If a woman demands that a man propose immediately (or almost immediately) with no forewarning and threatens to leave if he does not comply, she’d come across as positively nuts.

So in conclusion, I think that Phoebe is quite right that women should not be tagged with the label of “nag” for agitating for marriage. Women should be free to ask out men that they would like to see, but I don’t blame them for failing to do so and (with the exception of the Beavises) don’t blame men for being a little wary of being asked out. I disagree with some of her analysis, but it definitely got me thinking about the subject.

One thing that a lot of people seem to agree on is that one of the major reasons that marriage rates are down is because men are stuck in a period of perpetual adolescence and are putting off marriage with the old addage about cows and free milk. Phi takes objection to this interpretation:

Stop, stop, STOP! A pox on both your houses! The premise as stipulated by both Kay and her interlocutors — that men are deciding to put off marriage — is utterly and completely false as a generality applied to all men!

But to know this, Kay would have to open her eyes beyond their currently narrow field. For she is guilty of the same error as the men for whom women of less than car show model attractiveness are invisible. Like them, Kay only sees men in the top 5% of the status hierarchy, the same 5% being pursued by 95% of women, the same 5% for whose attentions women bid in an arms race to the bottom. Of course those men don’t want to get married: in the immortal words of Kelly Bundy, why buy the cow when you can get the eggs for free?

But what about the other 95%? You know: the ones standing on the sidelines looking desperately for some sign of encouragement. The ones with no idea how to talk to a woman because, well, none of them have. The ones without game.

Phi is undoubtedly correct that this phenomenon as it pertains to all men is considerably overstated, but so is the notion that it only applies to men in the top 5%. There are at least two things to consider here. First, that while lower marriage rates is certainly true, I think we really need to keep in mind that in proportion to the entire population they are overstated. When a lot of people talk about how this phenomenon or that phenomenon is “destroying marriage” or somesuch, they’re overlooking the fact that nothing has changed the fact that most people do, at some point in their life, actually get married.

But marriage rates are down and I agree with Phi that it’s not just men that are causing that. It’s often caused because women have decided that it’s better not to get married than to marry to wrong person. I think that this is overall not a particularly negative development. Women should not be socially coerced to get married to someone that does not make them happy just so that there are enough wives to go around. The same is true of men. At least one place where Phi and I disagree is whether these men “aren’t good enough” because women are holding their standards too high or because they simply haven’t met a man that meets reasonable standards. He seems to view the problem as one of women’s standards. I view it primarily as being related to the collapse of a lot of social institutions and conventions that make it a lot more difficult to meet people than it used to be. Women’s standards are an issue, but so too is prolonged adolescence on the part of men.

Phi takes that view that pushing off getting married is the province of men with easy access to sex with a lot of different women and that composes of 5% of the male population or so. I have no opinion on whether easy access to sex is limited to the top 5% of men or not, but I really think that he’s overlooking something that really does apply to a significant portion of the other 95%. To be blunt, I think that he is transposing his own perspective, that as a former young man in search for a wife whose efforts were blunted by women exhibiting particular behaviors, to most men. At the very least, it is far from clear to me that what most young women want is to find a nice young woman to get married to as was (presumably) the case with Phi when he was younger.

First of all, it’s not solely the province of the top 5% to have sexual access to women. Most of my male friends (that I’m close enough to know this kind of thing) had somewhere between 3-15 sexual partners. That’s not a lot by the standards portrayed by the media today, but it’s enough. Enough for what? Enough to believe that if they don’t get married, they will have other sexual partners and thus they are paying an opportunity cost for their monogamy and more importantly, by marrying that they will permanently forego any other opportunities.

But it’s not just sexual access that forestall’s a man’s decision to get married. In fact, all the man really needs is the belief that the current state of affairs with a woman or women is better than a married state of affairs would be with a woman that makes herself available to him to get married. With the exception of Station Fours, any man can relatively easily come to this conclusion. It may be easier for him to do so corresponding with the number of options that he has, but relationships and partnering up are extremely relative in nature and this applies more-or-less across the spectrum.

Added to this is the fact that men (and women) have to make the active decision that they are unlikely to do better than permanently partnering up with the woman that they’re with (or that would be with them) to marry. Putting off that active decision, or failing to make it altogether, defaults to “no marriage”.

More to the point, with the social pressures of marrying lower than they’ve ever been, the ability to kick the decision down the road in perpetuity becomes more possible. As it stands now, men are able to – without consequence – stall confronting this tough decision until he runs the risk of losing what he has now because she’s telling him to fish or cut bait or if he’s not able to get something that he wants from the relationship until he makes the decision to take the relationship to the next stage.

The ideal used to require that he consents to taking the marriage path in order to have sex. Now a man can get even more. He can live as husband and wife without having to make that level of commitment. They can live together, share expenses, have one another to come home to, and have regular sexual access to one another without having to make the tough decision of permanency. This is one of the reasons that I consider premarital cohabitation to be a barrier rather than a prelude to marriage.

None of this is solely reserved for men with game. The example in my life that I was closest to, Julie and Tony, involved a man that had no college degree, made less money than her, had fewer romantic options than her, and to my knowledge had only one sexual partner before her. All he really had going for him was a good heart, a steady (though not substantial) income, and a degree of personability (but only once you got to know him). In other words, the typical “Beta Male”. Despite all this, he put off marriage, took up four years of her life, and left her exhausted and embittered.

The mistake that she made was not holding out for an Alpha, but rather for indulging him a way of life that gave him the benefits of marriage without having to confront the costs of it. It was only when she took a stand (needing a darn good reason why they shouldn’t get married) that he confronted it and determined that she was not right for him. Had she forced this decision earlier, I don’t know that the result would have been any different at the end, but it likely would have taken a lot less out of her and would have freed her up to find somebody that she’s more compatible with.

I’m certainly not saying that it always turns out this way, but I find the notion that women can avoid these fates by avoiding a specific kind of “wrong” guy to be problematic. I think that Hymowitz has a point that the current state of affairs has made too many guys wrong in this regard.

I’m also not saying that the decline in marriage is all or mostly the fault of men. It’s the product of a lot of things. It’s not entirely a negative phenomenon except to particular segments of the population (men and women that value marriage above more than their society does). But it’s definitely not the product of “alpha men” and the women that acknowledge no other.

“I know when I’m busting them. What I didn’t realize is what a pain I’ve been when I thought I was just being me. At age six, I decide I don’t need to talk to other kids ever again, my parents are the ones that get called into school. At 12, I decide to try out some Shakespearian insults on my teachers, my parents are the ones that called ito school. At fifteen, I decide to start writing revenge fantasies just to get a reaction…” -Daria Morgandorffer

Perhaps the best episode of the old MTV cartoon Daria was the last one. It was an unusually somber episode. In the episode, a refrigerator box triggers a memory of Daria’s of her parents having some nasty fight and her father yelling as he ran out the door. The cause of the tension that caused the fight was Daria herself. She had made the decision to go her own way and she paid a steep cost for it. What she never realized was that her parents were paying a price for it, too.

The same goes for Dharma’s parents on the TV show Dharma & Greg. Being anti-establishment and all that, they chose never to formalize their relationship with marriage. For them that was fine for the most part, though it was a form of isolation and instability for Dharma. The instability turned out to be illusory as they were happily together for 28 years at the outset of the show, but it was there all the same.

“There were times growing up when I wish you guys were married. Like that time in ballet class when all the kids called me The Graceful Little Bastard…” “All my life, you guys told me that your way was better because every day you chose to be together. Did you ever stop to think that there was somebody in that house that woke up in the morning wondering if this was the day her parents were going to choose not to be together?” -Dharma Montgomery

One area where my wife and I differ philosophically is when it comes to tradition and cultural norms. Her perspective is that culture norms must be justified rationally, practically, and morally in order to be adhered to. I take a slightly different view, which is that a cultural norm and tradition must be demonstrably irrational, impractical, or immoral in order to be tossed aside.

To me, tradition and cultural norms have intrinsic practicality and are naturally rational because the path most taken is the path of least resistance. That’s not to say that I always advocate this path, but if I am mulling over an alternative, I need a good reason to take it. Being different for the sake of being different is a social dead end and is not good for the actor, for the culture surrounding him, and as I’m getting to in this post not good for the people around the actor. As Daria and Dharma’s parents learned, there are people around you who pay the price for you to “do your own thing.”

One last example I will throw out there is from The Practice, where one of the biggie lawyers at a major firm is talking to a lowly associate that she just caught dancing on a bar-room table.

When you meet new people I imagine the question ‘What do you do?’ pops immediately into the conversation. You answer ‘I’m an attorney at Crane, Poole, & Schmidt’. When others describe you: smart girl, nice, works at Crane, Poole, & Schmidt. As much as you might like to lay claim to your personal time and your private life, who you are and where you work are inextricably bound, Sally. And when you’re standing in a public bar, on the bar, half-naked, thrusting your great divide as if it were a tourist attraction, there are people saying ‘she’s a lawyer at Crane, Poole, & Schmidt’.” -Hannah Rose

It’s certainly no secret that what we do has an effect on those around us. What I think that we sometimes forget, though, is that even when we’re not doing something that directly harms someone else, we may be harming them in another way. Putting them in a particular pickle. Even if what you’re doing isn’t wrong at all, as long as it garners negative attention to you, it does the same to people around you.

If a couple chooses to get married by a JP in some location other than a church, that could cause discomfort for the bride’s or groom’s mother who has to explain to her religious friends “Why not?” (if they’re religious). A wife that chooses not to take her husband’s name may have good reasons for it and may not mind explaining to everybody that she chose to keep her birth name, but she has enlisted the help of her husband, her future children, and others in associating them with a principled stance that isn’t theirs. Parents that don’t go to church are isolating their kids from one of the great social magnets of American society and making them forever different. A kid that grows up and becomes a shock jock is putting his parents in the position of having to pretend to approve of what he does or tell their friends that they’re not proud of their kid. A Mormon that leaves the church also leaves behind parents that are stuck with some judgmental fellow parishioners who think that they’ve failed as parents.

None of this is to say that anybody should toe the line for the sake of everyone around them. We all have to make our own decisions and be our own persons. The main thing that I’m trying to get at here, though, is that who we become affects those around us even if we are not doing anything wrong in our own eyes and we’re willing to pay the costs of going against the grain.

Barry and Bob have a back-and-forth on one of Web’s post about the extent to which sex that is derived from the impairment of judgment that comes with alochol consumption should be considered rape.

Barry:

There’s always the argument that, if it’s possible to consent to sex while under the influence of alcohol when normally you wouldn’t, then the person loses some of that right to use it as a defense the moment they take that first drink. One might say by taking that first drink, you open yourself to the possibility that one might lead to another, and another, and another and eventually waking up next to a guy (or girl) you don’t know and terribly afraid of something you (or they) did that night.

To me, sure there’s a lot of grey areas in that forbidden land of who said what and when and under what degree of impairment – but it’s the responsibility of each individual to not drink if there’s a chance that such an unwanted event could occur.

Bob:

Barry, you could a organize society according to the rule you propose, but we have not. In general, I cannot agree to sell my house for you $10 when I am drunk. Neither can a nurse get me to consent to giving her my kidney as I am coming off of general anesthesia (despite my having known fully well that I would be groggy when I got out of it.)

The problem with Bob’s example is that it is something where a “take-back” is possible. You can invalidate a contract, but you can’t un-make a night of groggy sex. Of course, if you agree to sell your kidney under the influence and it is taken before you sober up, that’s somewhat more comparable. Though even there you have expectations at play. A man or woman that gets drunk knows that there are certain risks involved from something relatively minor like coyote ugly to something severe like rape. There is no expectation that a kidney-seller might want you to become a vendor on the spot.

That being said, I’m probably more sympathetic to Bob’s point of view than I am Barry’s. A woman that gets drunk and gets raped may share some moral and logistical culpability, but I could not even remotely support a regime where she bears moral culpability in all cases. For one thing, the man may have been less than forthcoming about what he put in the mixed drinks and it should not be up to her to prove otherwise.

When it’s obvious that the man got the woman drunk for the sake of fornication, it’s pretty clearly rape. When a woman gets drunk independently and a man (knowing that her judgment is impaired by alcohol) and in a sober state takes advantage of her, that’s something less severe than forcible rape but is extremely serious nonetheless.

But there are a lot of gray areas. If a woman is in extreme emotional turmoil, she may consent to actions that she would later regret. Her state-of-mind may be such that it’s actually worse than if she should be drinking. I can imagine scenarios in which this is actually worse than taking advantage of someone that got independently drunk. The woman is less likely to have been put in that awful emotional place as voluntarily as the woman got drunk, for instance. The problem is that opening up a law to this effect, criminally prohibiting sex because the woman was not emotionally prepared for it, opens doors that few have seriously suggested opening and even if I did oppose the criminalization of having sex with a drunk woman, one wrong need not justify another.

Another area of concern when it comes to rape law is that when a drunk woman has sex, there is a not-unsubstantial likelihood that the man is drunk as well. What is the right approach when that is the case? Most of the time the woman will not feel taken advantage of and would not press charges. But what if she does? Being drunk is not a defense against committing other crimes. Even something like solicitation, where there that’s exactly the sort of misjudgment that alcohol would set free to roam. Should in that vein, why should we make an exception for rape?

Some women (and some men, to be sure) are rather unsympathetic to this plight. The idea is that he should have thought of that before he got drunk. But of course that same argument could be used for the woman, as Barry suggests. The second prong to the argument is that consensual drunken sex wouldn’t be brought to the courts because the hardship a woman faces when making rape accusations would make it so that she would only step forward if it were something serious. There is definitely some truth to this as I would bet a substantial sum that unreported rape cases are much more frequent than false accusations. But relying on the honor and judgment of women can be a pretty serious risk to impose on men.

One of the stimying problems in the discussion is that by and large men are far-and-away more likely to be accused of rape and women are far-and-away more likely to be raped. That puts each side of the gender divide of having to assess the risk to the other. No great surprise, men often assert that women should assume the risks (or assumed them with the behavior that led up to the act) and women assert that men should.

Though it does happen, men are rarely raped and so it’s hard to fully appreciate a woman’s fear of it and why it’s so important that women that are raped have as many rights as possible. If you make it harder to make the accusation, there will be fewer stepping forward and more ways for men to evade responsibility for their acts. Women, on the other hand, are rarely (falsely or otherwise) accused of rape and so it’s hard for them to fully appreciate men’s fear of it and why we’re often very apprehensive about making rape charges easier to make. The easier it is for women to make substantive accusations of rape, the more vulnerable they are even if they’ve done nothing wrong.

As I say with regularity, it’s easy to be cavalier about the risks assigned to others than to ourselves.

Spungen has written a post inspired by a comment that I made on Half Sigma about community colleges that left her with the impression that I didn’t think that I would be bothered by being surrounded by people of lower economic and social classes.

One of the constant themes of Spungen’s posts regarding money and class is that the worst parts about not having money is the inability to filter out lower-class people the way that they are automatically filtered out when you grow up in an environment with money and with the seeming impenetrability of the upper classes who are rather difficult to meet when you didn’t have the opportunity to go to the same schools that they did or work the same jobs that they do.

The second aspect of that, the impenetrability of the upper classes, is something that some people can relate to even if they come from more money than Spungen did. When a lot of us get out of college we are suddenly no longer surrounded by peers. One of my earliest jobs outside of college was in an office place where I was the only person under 35 working in the office throughout most of my tenure and I was the only unmarried person ineligible for AARP. Contrast that to my job at Falstaff in Deseret where I was surrounded by young and mostly unmarried people* and had one of the best social atmospheres I’d ever had at any job before or since.

Of course, that’s definitely not the same thing as Spungen’s complaint because I still had my college friends and roommates to lean on. I also had friends in the area dating back to high school. If I’d been more on-the-ball, I could have utilized those friends to make more. The issue for Spungen is that those opportunities were not available to her in the first place. She’d been at that point where I was only temporarily (at a couple jobs in Colosse) for most of her life. Plus, I had the first part. When I was working at Wildcat, I could go out and hang out at the warehouse if I wanted to or I could stay in. It was completely my call. But it at least gives me an idea of what she means and a place to start from when contemplating it.

In the course of the conversation that followed from Spungen’s post, Larry pointed out that the Internet changes this somewhat. Now there’s a way to meet people outside work and geographical boundaries.

I think that there’s an important distinction to make, though, between friendships that start on the Internet and move offline and those that start and end by way of the Internet. Those friendships that have always existed independent of geography rarely last as long as those friendships that you take offline. Part of it is that friendship bonds occur, in part, through common experiences. Having a common background helps, but it seems to me that friendships that occur without something concrete tend to dissipate over time once whatever bond you do have loosens. One of you gets out of the routine of visiting a particular message board or stops collecting whatever collectables you originally started talking about, your paths diverge even if your online friendship once went beyond that to a more personal level.

Where I would expect the Internet to be most useful are ones that may have started online, but eventually moved offline. That requires, among other things, geography. Once a friendship moves offline, it becomes like any other. The fact that you met via computers and cables becomes a biographical detail.

As most of you know, when I was in my late teens I joined a BBS that allowed me to talk to others through a computer. I made a lot of friends on Camelot BBS. I met a lot of those people offline at parties and whatnot. Some I became friends with independent of Camelot. Whether we became friends offline or not share no more than a little corrollation with how close we were online. It would start because we both happened to be free on the same weekend, they needed a ride somewhere, or something like that. More on that in a sec. Yet it’s those friendships that endured. It was through those people that I found my social networks. Those are the people that came to my wedding and I theirs. Those are the people that I talk about here in the present tense. Hubert, Kyle, and Tony were never my best friends on Camelot, but they’re among my best friends now.

That’s one of the downsides of the Internet compared to Camelot. Since calls were clearly marked long and shortdistance in the age before cell phones and VoIP, everybody that called was in the same town. When I was hanging out on the Internet as a single guy, I had to work to filter out-of-towners when it came to meeting girls or guys to boost my social life. In that sense, something like a BBS wouldn’t have helped Spungen back in her day because there was probably not a big BBSing scene where she’s from. Young people growing up there now can make friends all across the country, but not in ways that noticeably improve their social life.

Geography matters a great deal in these things. I remember my freshman year in college when Hubert and I were living in Lecter Hall and most of his friends were in Greenwood Hall. Despite the fact that they were his friends, they kept doing things without him. Not because they were trying to exclude him (he had not yet become nearly intolerable), but because they’d all be hanging around the dorm and they’d decide to do something spontaneously and he though he was a building away he was nonetheless excluded by default because he didn’t happen to be right there. On the other hand, I became friends with Web, Karl, John Fustle, and various other people at first because they were around a lot. They were sort of friends by osmosis. Some of those friendships endured, like Web and Hubert, but others have since become frequent acquaintances. Even with the latter people, though, the point is that we all had ample opportunity to get to know one another due primarily to proximity.

That’s one of the hardest parts for people that aren’t in proximity to people that they’re a good match for. Spungen was born with the sharp, inquisitive, and ambitious mind that was suited for the sort of nice suburb that she lives in now. She just didn’t grow up there and never had the kind of money to have the sort of proximity that she needed until much later in life. The Internet or BBSes could have helped her find those people that did live near her that shared her interests, but only to the extent that those people existed and that they had transportation to form their own network outside their school, as I did with my Camelot friends, or the opportunity to join an existing network.

Of course, even with that, she would still have the Hubert Problem. And she would have the problem that I had in junior high and at other select portions of my life, where she is stuck around people not of her own choosing that often don’t treat her (or one another) well and aren’t generally compatible even if they do. So while it would alleviate the overall problem, it certainly wouldn’t fix it even in the best of circumstances.

This all leaves me a little concerned for the future children that Clancy and I will have. We will be living in a small town. Most small towns are generally speaking undereducated and a lot of them contain a fair amount of poverty. Poverty won’t be a problem in the Truman household, but that may not matter as much as I would like. Clancy once did a brief stint in a small town in the rural northwest.

One of the things that stood out to me when I visited her there was how unusually “middle class” the town was for such a small place unconnected with any particular large places. There was a two-year college there, but it wasn’t a college town. Clancy and I have been looking closer at college towns than other places of comparable size so that, as I put it, I wouldn’t be the only person on the school board voting to teach evolution in science class. Keeping all of the above in mind, finding a town with a substantial educated population takes on more importance because of the effects that it might have on our kids.

* – Yes, I was married at the time, but I was a residency widower. So while I wasn’t in the dating market, I still needed friends moreso than the average married guy does. And they couldn’t be “couples” friends because the other part of my couple was always working.

Maybe it’s because I believe in the message of finding contentment in the marvels of modern society, but I thought this was laugh-out-loud funny:

Three stories:

In high school, I had a friend named Cruz. In the course of our friendship, I had my faith in friendship rocked by my best friend attempting to steal a girl that I was kinda-sorta-but-not-really dating. If a friend would do that to you, what use was friendship? So I coined new phrases for the people that I used to call friends. Cruz was honestly hurt when I didn’t call him my friend. He stood by me, though, and eventually things returned to normal.

In college, my roommate Hubert stumbled upon some IM conversations where I told a story about something that he’d done and I had portrayed him in a pretty devastating light and implied in the email that I had a pretty negative opinion of him altogether and that me and some friends talked about him in this negative light with some frequency.

Last year, a friend of mine came across something that I had written to someone else about her. Not to mince words, it came across pretty much as a scathing rebuke of her very existence. It was merciless, unfair, and not without some exaggerations and inaccuracies. I felt genuinely bad about the whole situation. I had difficulty sleeping and had to take some long looks at myself in the mirror. The strange thing, though, was that I felt less guilty about what I’d said (save for the inaccuracies) but that I had expressed these thoughts in a way that they could get back to her. I felt bad not so much for having the opinion that I did, but rather for being so careless in how I expressed them and hurting her in the process.

I am one of those people that does talk negatively around some friends behind their back. It’s not one of my more flattering characteristics. I generally do so, however, within certain bounds. I have my own ethical system. On one hand, I believe in being diplomatic with people that you don’t like and not creating any more conflict than already exists in this world. I am not a person that believes that honesty is always the best policy when it comes to such things. On the other hand, I also believe that it’s wrong and an overall bad thing to poison people’s attitudes towards one another by talking about them behind their back. On the first hand, though, if I feel something strong enough I can’t keep it bottled up forever. I am an expressive person.

So I have created my own ethical system of do’s and don’ts. When I speak negatively about people that I would consider my friends or friendly acquaintances, I do so only if the person I am talking to falls into one of three basic categories: (1) They have no personal connection with the person that I am talking about. Their opinion of this person doesn’t matter and will not adversely affect the life of the person that I am talking about. (2) I know that the person feels the same way that I do about this person. I am not poisoning their opinion towards them. (3) The person I’m talking to may know the person that I am talking about, but the person I am talking to primarily knows them through me and I am the access point between them. If I think that they might start of a friendship independently of me, I will probably find another confidante.

In essence, a lot of it comes down to “Will the person find out that I am talking about them in such a manner?” This may sound extremely two-faced and that’s because it is. However, it follows the golden rule. If someone feels the need to tear me down, I’d rather they keep their thoughts to themselves rather than tell me to avoid being two-faced. I’d rather that anybody they tell is someone that doesn’t know me and won’t cause trouble in my life or absent that I would prefer that they be somebody that I have no shot and friendship or alliance with me because they are allied with somebody that apparently doesn’t like me. To me it’s about minimizing hurt while accepting that everyone has a right to their opinion and accepting their need to express it every once and again. Of course I don’t want anyone to have a negative opinion of me and in my selfish heart of hearts I would prefer that if they did they would tell absolutely nobody, but I recognize that’s not realistic and I account for it.

So let me get back to the third story. Her discovery lead to some extremely uncomfortable conversations between she and I. She was of course very hurt about the things that I’d said and unfortunately I couldn’t entirely take them back because I’d obviously expressed them pretty freely. What was interesting about her reaction, though, was that in addition to just being personally hurt and angry, she was angry because I said what I said while pretending to be her friend.

And I did act as her friend. When I found out that she was stuck on the side of the road, I stopped and kept her company until her boyfriend could get there. When I got the sense that she was really upset about something, I’d pull her aside and ask what the matter was and offer any words of encouragement or consolation that I could. That was, in her mind, pure fakery and a something of a lie. Why would I pretend to be her friend when I had such a nasty perception of her? She could understand being cordial because she was dating my good friend, but why lie?

The truth is that in my mind I wasn’t pretending. I was her friend and she mine. This friendship had little or nothing to whether I liked her or not. Sounds strange when you put it that way, but that was how I felt and how I feel. Friendship, in my mind, is something that you do rather than something that you feel. Part of me carried on because I was hoping that my opinion about her would change (and it had started to somewhat, but not enough). But mostly I considered us friends because that’s how we behaved (for whatever reason).

Most of the time we are friends with people that we like. We choose to spend time with people whose company that we enjoy. Sometimes, though, friendship is borne for other reasons. In her case it was because she was dating my friend. When I was a kid I had a friend that I was friends with because her mother and my mother were tight. We weren’t just acquaintances. In some people’s mind we weren’t friends, either, but in my mind we were. And to be honest, in most of the social circles I’ve run, there have been some friends that I didn’t actually like very much. Sometimes because I didn’t let my dislike for them hinder the friendship, I actually came to like them. Sometimes I didn’t and when circumstances no longer required it, I shuffled away as quick as I could.

It may make more sense to you if you think about it in the inverse. You ever know somebody that you really like but you can’t be friends with? I knew one guy when I was working at Falstaff in Deseret. His name was Teddy Forbes. I liked Teddy a lot. He was the kind of guy that I could have hung out with all the time. Unfortunately, the context in which I knew him meant that he and I would constantly be at one another’s throats. I liked him well enough, but he was forever my adversary and I ultimately wished him ill in an impersonal way. A less specific example would be when a romantic breakup occurs, you lose friends that you like because you all get divvied up. A girl break’s a good friend’s heart, she’s dead to me no matter how much I liked her.

Friendship is, as I would define it, being woken up at three in the morning and having to scotch off to the county jailhouse to bail your friend out of jail and to do so without articulating the belief that they “owe” you. I would have done that with Hubert, Cruz, and the friend that I had said some pretty awful things about. I believe that all three would have done the same for me. I would have bailed Teddy out, too, but he would have owed me big time and I would have made sure to collect. When it comes to acquaintances you keep score. You don’t when it comes to friends.

I could mince words and say that she was an acquaintance and that’s what she initially said she would have preferred in light of some of my thoughts about her. Impressively, though, she actually came to understand what it was I was saying. In her circumstances, I probably would have been too hurt to. As the dust settled said that she too would have bailed me out at three in the morning and I learned that I had rather underestimated her.

Clancy and I came from remarkably similar backgrounds. We’re both the children of upper-middle class professionals with advanced degrees in the same field. School was considered important for both of us as we were coming up and stated expectations were that we would graduate college and eventually settle down in a professional career. We both went to church on Sunday and kept close ties with one side of our family but not so much the other. And perhaps most importantly, we were raised with similar values. I think it’s because of these similarities that our differences stand out so starkly.

One of our big differences, both in the way that we were raised and in the way that we see the world, involves entertainment. I was raised on television. I watched obscene amounts of it. I wish I could have back the amount of time I spent watching an episode of Matlock for the 15th time. I wish I had spent more time writing and drawing and going out (as I got older). When Clancy and I have kids, I’m not going to let them watch as much television as I watched growing up. I didn’t spend nearly as much time as my peers playing video games mostly because my parents wouldn’t get me a Nintendo because my grades were so bad. But boy did I want one and for the longest time their refusal to budge on that issue was one of the biggest chips on my shoulder.

Clancy, on the other hand, got very little television growing up. She spent lots and lots of time reading. Television was something that her father mostly watched. Notably, when her father watched it, he was not amenable to being interrupted at all. As such, Clancy grew up with something of a negative view of television in part because of that alone. More broadly, though, she views television, comic books, and video games were considered by her to be suspect. She considered reading to be inherently superior to all of these things and to some extent time spent consuming any of the above was time wasted that would be better spent doing something better. Though I can agree that I wasted a lot of time watching television, where I primarily took issue with her was the notion that those things should in and of themselves be considered at best a “guilty pleasure”.

Television in particular is something that I’m remarkably defensive about. Just as part of Clancy’s animus towards TV can be traced back to the way that it sucked her father’s attention away from her when she was young, I suppose some of my defensiveness can be chalked up to the fact that television made me who I am and to repudiate it completely is to repudiate who I am. It may not mean that I am something bad, but at the very least it means that I am something less than what I could be. On some level this is undoubtedly true just as 100,000 things I did when I was younger was ultimately non-productive, but I don’t think that it’s nearly as true as a lot of medical doctors and cultural critics say it is.

The place that most cultural critics point to are medical studies linking television to obesity among other things. While it’s true that if you sit around and do nothing but watch television all day like I did, you’ll likely get fat like I did, the cause-effect relationship is not as clear as the people that point to the studies suggest. Though I exclude my parents from this category, it is undeniably true that the same sorts of parents that don’t monitor the TV habits of their young ones also don’t monitor their caloric intake. Parents that are not around enough to keep tabs on kids’ TV habits similarly don’t have time to cook healthy meals and are more likely to rely on unhealthy alternatives. Parents that don’t know how damaging excessive TV watching might be also don’t fully appreciate how bad for them much of the food they eat really is.

The biggest problem I have with critics of television is that for the most part they consider television a thing. I think that further they often equate television with the least intellectually nutritious brand of it. Most of my personal problem with the television that I watched when I was younger actually had less to do with sheer volume and more to do with what I watched and how I watched the same things over and over again. Granted, there weren’t the kinds of options then that there are now, so it’s possible that if I hadn’t rewatched Gilligan’s Island there wouldn’t have been anything for me to watch and that time would have been better doing just about anything else. Be that as it may, the same isn’t entirely true today.

I could go on and on about how much I actually learned from television growing up and how it’s influenced my life in positive ways. I could speculate that reading would have done the same only better, but that wouldn’t be much more than speculation. I can also grant that the effort of reading makes it unlikely that you’ll waste time reading crap whereas the comparative ease of television makes it easy to be indiscriminate, but I consider that a challenge to be overcome rather than an example of one’s innate superiority over the other.

To go back to the beginning for a moment, I think that it’s true that people watch too much television and in particular watch too much crap on television. I believe muchly that I did the same. What I reject is the notion that television is inherently bad or that cases when it isn’t bad are some shocking exception to the rule. I also reject the notion that television is inherently inferior to reading in all but the most asymmetrical circumstances. I believe that television actually has some rock-hard advantages over reading just as reading has advantages over television. I also believe that video games, a “guilty pleasure” I rarely partake in, have advantages over both television and reading.

So what are these TV advantages? That is for another post…

Ever since I was sixteen, I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time online. It started with BBSes though I eventually graduated to the Internet. When online dating services were getting going, I tried them out extensively as did a lot of my friends. Despite this, not a single person in my circle married somebody that they met on an online dating service. Of The Big Four girls in my history, only one did I meet through any matching service and neither of us had on our profiles that we were looking for significant others. On its face, online dating seems to be the most logical way to pair off that there is. You (usually) get to see a picture and get to know a little bit about them before you meet. When you do meet, you’re both ostensibly have the same goal in mind. So why is it that despite all this, it so rarely seems to pan out?

A lot of people are under the impression that it’s because only screwed up people use dating services. Even back in the old day that simply wasn’t true. The selection of girls that I met from online dating services was actually not all that different from ones I would have met anyway. Others point to the gender disparity with men using the services in much higher numbers than women. It’s true that forces a lot more work on the guys part competing with other guys and ladies filtering through a substantial number of responses… but the thing is that even once you get past that point, it still seems never to actually work out. Why?

1. Pressure. After a series of disappointments, I set up a rule where I had to try to set up a meeting with someone before no more than a week or three emails had passed. The main reason for this was that if there’s too much build-up, the meeting is bound to disappoint. The better the pre-meeting goes, the rockier the net-to-life transition. The more you know about them before you meet, the harder the meeting is. The correlation was about linear. Expectations get raised beyond the realistic when things have gone well before the meeting. You have this vision of what they will be like and they won’t ever match it. Not always because the vision is unrealistic, even. Sometimes they’re not worse in person, they’re just different.
2. Mannerisms and presence. We are more than a profile-and-pic. We are more than we can write on a profile or in even in a blog. We are more than our picture. We are a hundred thousand little things that we do that have the potential to endear or agitate someone. There are so many little subtle things that affect how it is that someone comes across to us. We make all sorts of assumptions as to how they think they will be and then when they’re not that way at all we won’t even be able to easily explain why. “I… uhhh… expected more of a nightly way about her” was how I described one. Nightly? What the hell does that mean? I’m a pretty articulate guy and I still can’t entirely explain it without resorting to comparisons with other girls I know. Not even comparisons like “She’s more ______ than the last girl I dated” but more “She’s more like Girl A than Girl B even though her profile and actual personality is more like Girl B.”
3. Raised standards. I know that I did this and I think a lot of guys do and maybe girls, too. Oddly, I think that we raise our standards when in a situation expressly designed to meet somebody. Particularly when we have someone to compare this person to. As guys glide through profiles, we see a lot of attractive girls that are out of our league. We’re naturally drawn to contact them first. With the limited information you have, the picture becomes a lot more important. Here are all of these quite attractive girls (and as a guy, those are definitely the ones that you notice the most) and they’re looking for a guy! and you’re a guy!! So you set your sites higher. You try to present yourself as being more impressive than you are so that they might meet you. Then of course they’re disappointed. Meanwhile, had you met the same exact selection in the office place, you would more naturally have gravitated towards people of your own stature if only because they’re the ones that smile at you from behind the receptionist desk while the hot girl at the copy station doesn’t even know you’re alive. Generally speaking, you have a better assessment of “How likely is it that a girl that looks like that would pair with a guy like me.” Lastly, you also don’t have the 100,000 little mannerisms to endear you to them, so you go with what you know, which is the picture, which expresses mostly more conventional beauty.
4. Intellectualizing attraction. When you meet someone explicitly in order to pair off, you’re looking very deeply at this person from the start. You’re looking at every potential pitfall. Everything they want from life that is the slightest bit incompatible with what you want. You’re asking from the get-go, “Is this something that I want to devote time and energy into making this permanent?” I think in more natural pairings there is a lot more of a mystery about whether or not the other person is thinking in that context and how. With online dating, you’ve established a lot of that. You’re put in the position of deciding whether you want to fall for this person rather than simply doing so. It turns a lot of it into more of an intellectual exercise. I think a lot of people are more likely to find problems early on from an intellectual analysis than the emotional experience that unfolds when it’s entirely personal.

The thing that all four of these items have in common is that online dating (and personals of other sorts) create an unnatural environment for one of the most natural of instincts. It applies a lot of pressure to figure things out before you’re ready. It puts too much out there before you can process it. I mention above that only one of my Big Four were met online and that none of my friends married someone they met from online personals.

That is true, but it’s not the whole truth. Evangeline is the only one of the four that I got to know online, but the truth is that I fell in love with her across a room over a year prior. I just didn’t know that I had because I didn’t know who she was. As for the other three… the Internet played a roll in all of them. Clancy and I met through a friend I met on the net. Julie and I met through a job that I got by meeting a friend on a BBS. Tracey and I met simply on a BBS and got to know one another there. My friend Tony met his wife in AOL chatrooms. Even though meeting online carries some of the above risks — particularly if potential romantic interest is declared before you actually meet them or have spent any significant time with them — there is still more of an opportunity for things to unfold naturally.

When I was in early college I had to take a Defensive Driving course. At the beginning of the course, they had a little video where then-President Bill Clinton expressed the importance of driving safely. There was a woman in the audience that spent the entire three minutes of the movie groaning. Nothing was more important to her, apparently, than registering her disgust with the president while he was talking about something about as uncontroversial as you can get. The rest of us, on the other hand, were there because we wanted lower auto insurance rates. Politics wasn’t supposed to figure in.

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Free speech is one of the hallmarks of democracy. Further, it’s important that issues are discussed and candidates are adequately appraised. Even uncomfortable issues need to be discussed if for no other reason to know why people think the way they do. Also important is to clear up misperceptions about candidates, reveal their flaws and extol their virtues so that we as a people make the better decisions come election times. While I would say that the tones and rhetoric often used to discuss politics is counterproductive, it’s nonetheless important to have the conversations in the first place.

But there is a time and place for these conversations and a time and place to avoid them. For instance, I have various friends that I refuse to discuss politics because there is nothing to be gained by it. Some people that I agree with 75% of the time I can’t discuss anything with and some that I have 25% in common I can. I don’t want politics on sports news networks. Unless it’s an intrinsically political act, I don’t want it at music shows either. Even if I agree with what the dude is saying, I cringe for the guy in the audience that went there to hear a song and instead heard that the singer thinks that he voted for an idiot. I almost never discuss politics in the workplace. You get the idea.

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Once upon a time, I used to be a political blogger. I enjoyed it a great deal for a while, though as time passed I began to enjoy it less and less. Early on there were a lot of discussions about policies and even politicians and you could find reasonable people of every political stripe to talk to and even find common ground with or at least a better understanding where, precisely, you see things differently. Over time, though, those friends became opponents because we stopped trying to find common ground or a sense of understanding. Then they became enemies as we stopped believing that the other person was acting with honesty and good faith. By the time I closed shop, there wasn’t a single issue that I didn’t already know who was going to object to my view, what incendiary figures they would bring up to discredit my view, what anecdotes that proved their case they would find, and what sorts of selective facts they would use from selective Internet surfing between sites that were more sympathetic to their point of view.

Because of this experience, I decided that I did not want Hit Coffee to be a political blog even though I am just as opinionated as I’ve always been and just as interested in politics and policy. This creates a bit of a problem for me because I am constantly thinking about politics, tracking the latest polls, considering the latest policy proposals, and weighing the stances on all sorts of issues. But for the most part I bite my tongue. When I do write about politics I try to maintain as neutral a tone as possible and represent both sides even if clearly coming out on one side or the other. I avoid contentious debates over which there is no compromise and nobody’s mind is going to be changed. I also avoid issues like race where things have the ability to turn very nasty very quickly. I try to avoid talking about the candidates directly either to endorse them or to denounce them.

The main reason I do this is because I want people to be comfortable coming here whether they are Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, or Independents. Or if they don’t care about politics at all. Politically contentious issues have the ability to suck the air of a room, so to speak. So politics would be a distraction towards the life issues and personal posts that I want to focus on. I don’t want to come home and think to myself “I wonder what political point I’m going to have to refute today…” as I did years ago and I don’t want a post about my immigrant neighbors to get hijacked into a conversation about immigration with broad stereotypes, selective statistics, accusations or racism, and so on.

Yesterday I wrote a post quoting Barack Obama about how he professes to have come by his faith and how he was initially suspicious of it. Maybe his entire account was a fictional creation to explain away an opportunistic conversion. Maybe it was the honest truth. I don’t really know and you don’t, either. Yet I think that there is a part of us that will always want to pin down the specifics in order to demonstrate that Obama is an honorable or dishonorable man, depending on what our politics are compared to his. I quoted the passage, though, as a thought about faith. Even if it was purely fictitious, it spoke to me and so I shared it as well as how it resonated with me. It took less than three comments before it was a referendum on Obama.

I have in the past put up pre-emptive notices on where I don’t want the comment thread of a post to go. People seem disinclined to say anything when I do so I think because nobody wants what they say to be misinterpreted as the aspect of the post that I don’t want to talk about. So I tried going without on the Salvation post and that really didn’t work. I don’t want to dictate the parameters of the comment section of every post that could fall prey to a political axe that someone wants to grind. So I’m not entirely sure what to do.

But for now I’m going to ask this: Hit Coffee is a venue to relax, think, and be entertained. If your comment will not help people (including me) do one of these three things and it has the potential to make people angry, reconsider posting it or at least how you post it. Calling somebody names or accusing their preferred candidate, party, religion, or whatever of being fraudulent, asinine, or stupid is not going to make someone reconsider their position. Implying that nobody intelligent or moral could take a position other than your own… well, same deal.

But in addition to wanting discussion to be thoughtful, I also would like discussion. If nobody commented on this blog I would have stopped writing it a long time ago. I consider most of you to be friends that I’ve never met (or that I have met, in some cases). So please don’t take any of this to mean that I don’t appreciate all of your contributions to this site which in many cases outmatch my own. More than anything I actually want to avoid the kinds of subjects that suck the air out of the room and prevent us from having the kinds of conversations that we ordinarily do.