Many years ago I had a conversation with Evangeline about who usually does the breaking up with in our respective relationships. I had commented that I seemed to be in an A/B rotation. I’d end it with one and then the next would end it with me. This pattern continued a few cycles. I asked if she had any patterns like that. She said that few of hers ended that way.

“Which way?” I asked.

“Either way,” sne answered.

“If you don’t end it and he doesn’t end it, how does it end?”

“I’ve perfected the art of getting them to think that it was their idea,” she explained.

—-

I can’t remember how it started, but my coworker Pat and I were talking about things that are such a bad idea that you have to ask yourself “In the face of so many obvious ways that it could create problems down the line, how did they envision that this would turn out to be a good and positive thing?”

Some examples:
* Some white cops got national attention by letting a couple black youths get out of a littering charge by performing rapping about how littering is a bad thing.
* A recent article in the New York Times about Ivy League young men and women posing nude for college magazines.
* Girls Gone Wild
* A guy in charge of a juvenile correctional facility going to a pornography convention and posing for pictures with various adult film actresses.
* A congressman emailing and IMing lurid content to pages
* Getting a tattoo with the name of a romantic person you’ve just recently become involved with.

That last one spawned a conversation about tattoos. We figured that if you got a tattoo with a woman’s name on it (say “Maria”), if things didn’t work out the next person you dated not named Maria might have an issue with that and the next person that was named Maria would be creeped out if she thought you got a tattoo with her name on it by the first or second date.

That reminded me of How I Met Your Mother, which I’d just written a post on. In the first episode, Ted ruins his burgeoning relationship with Robin by professing his love for her on their first date. Barney, Ted’s misogynistic friend, begins using that as a way to get rid of young women the morning after. If you really wanted to take that to the next level, getting a temporary tattoo with that person’s name on it would be extremely effective at scaring them off. And, as with Evangeline, they would almost certainly believe that it was their idea and would never look back. You wouldn’t even have to worry about them wanting to be your friend cause they would either feel really guilty or really scared of you.

Genius, Pure genius.

One thing you may or may not know about clocks is that they don’t use the same Roman Numeral system that is used virtually everywhere else. It’s almost the same, but the number 4 is more often than not IIII rather than IV. There are a lot of theories as to why this is the case, but it is so. If you want to make a quick buck, find a watch that uses the correct “IV” and bet them that you can see something unsual about the clock that they can’t. It may take a little while to collect because they’ll doubt you at first, but the majority of clocks use IIII. I’ve personally won bets with my mother, two ex-girlfriends, and various acquaintances. If nothing else it’s good for them buying you a beer next time around.

One thing that I don’t think I ever appreciated about leather or fake-leather is now much it absorbs cigarette smoke. Last night while watching TV Clancy requested that I remove my watch because it smelled like cigarette smoke. She’s asked me more than a couple times in the past couple weeks if I’ve been out to “Visit Uncle Phil”, which is code for whether or not I’ve been smoking. She believed me when I told her that I hadn’t, but she had to ask because she could smell it on me. Time and time again, we’ve figured out that it was the watch.

Who knew that such a small band of fake leather could carry such a smell?

When I was in the 8th grade my intermediate school took the rite-of-passage trip to Washington DC. I’ll write more about that later, but the most lasting affect that it had on me was that I have not been consistently without a watch since.

I’d started to take it for granted that a clock would always be near. We had them at home, in every classroom at school, and so on. Clocks, it turns out, are few and far between the in the Hallowed Halls of our government. I’m not sure if that says something insightful about our government or not. Anyway, I went absolutely nuts not knowing the time at all times. So nuts that I asked my friend Oswald the time every two minutes. He eventually put the watch in his pocket and refused to answer any time-related questions.

So contra Daniel Gross, I don’t think that the watch business has anything to worry about with clocks for me. The bad news is that I almost always buy really cheap watches. I’m a fiend of the $9.99 counter at Walmart.

For my recent non-birthday/birthday thing at the end of February, my folks took an old watch that I’d left down there with a dissolving band and got the band replaced. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the band probably cost as much as the watch did.

Lastly, one peculiarity about my watch-wearing and one of the relatively few ways that I am chicklike when it comes to my personal appearance is that my watch absolutely has to match. I always, always, always match my watch, belt, and boots with either a black/silver combination or brown/gold. Whenever I don’t I feel so awkward that I take my watch off and keep it in my pocket. Taking it out every couple of minutes to find out what time it is.

I was introduced to The Nguyen Count several years ago by a friend. It was named after a young lady with the last name of Nguyen who had the awful luck of repeatedly dating guys who married the next woman that they dated, even though she really wanted to get married. Over time Nguyen Count was augmented as Miss Nguyen started sharing her story and others began topping it. The bad news is that the higher the count, the more cause for embarassment you have. The good news is that a higher account means your my-pathetic-luck stories surpass others, and in the single world where self-pity is king that is no small thing. I’ve never met Miss Nguyen — for all I know she is the stuff of lore — but her count was entrenched in the dating vocabulary of my social circle.

Scoring goes as follows:
+1 if the man/woman you dated exclusively ended up marrying the next person they were with. (no points awarded if you are/were anti-marriage)
+1 if the man/woman you dated succeeded you with a homosexual relationship. (no points if the person who preceded you was also of the same gender as your partner)
+1 if the man/woman ended up exclusively homosexual, but discovered this after the person after you. (no points awarded if they were already openly bisexual when you dated)
+1 if the man/woman you dated had kids with a later partner even if they swore they wouldn’t (if it’s the person after you, the +1 above is applicable, but no points are awarded here if you didn’t want kids yourself)
+2 if the man/woman you dated married someone that they previously considered having a disqualifying characteristic (Different religion, different politics, divorced, has kids, etc. but no points are awarded if their requirement was completely frivolous like never marrying a redhead or something)
+2 if the man/woman you dated succeeded you with their very first homosexual relationship.
+2 if the man/woman you dated ended up marrying the next person they were with and that person was someone that they met through you.
+3 if the man/woman you dated is married to someone of their gender by the laws of Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii, or some other state that allows for it.

So… what is your Nguyen Count?

I think mine is zero, though it may be one if they never ended up getting married. I’m not sure it counts even if they did marry as I sorta kinda maybe “stole” her from him in the first place.

{The following post contains spoilers of the TV show How I Met Your Mother, though only up to the first season because that’s all I’ve seen to date. I start watching the second season today and wanted to put these thoughts out there while they still apply to the series in my mind}

In the first episode of the first season, Ted meets the woman of his dreams, Robin. While the show is generally about Ted’s attempts to meet “the one”, most of the first season focuses around Robin. The hook is that in the first episode it is revealed that Robin is not the one. No other woman he meets in the first season is the one, either. The show toys with its audience with the focus on Ted and Robin as well as with a couple other really nice girls that Ted meets along the way.

Where the show succeeds, somewhat astonishingly, is in getting its audience (well, getting me) to root for Ted and Robin to work out. I’m sort of a sourpuss when it comes to sitcom romance and frequently find myself rooting against two characters getting together because I get no payoff when they do and the sexual tension of the show, if there ever was any, dissipates. And when the characters do get together, they typically have each of them do stupid things to keep things from being imperfect (because comedy is about, if nothing else, the imperfectibility of human nature).

But rather than the fact that Robin and Ted (and Victoria and Ted, etc.) don’t end up together being limited, it actually frees up the show somewhat. The characters weren’t meant to be together so you know that they won’t magically end up in each others arms and happy despite their stupidity, as is frequently the case in such shows. In one sense I expect to spend the next season waiting for the shoe to drop. But rather than doing it with anxious anticipation, I view it as the natural extension of their personalities. When things don’t work out there is usually a reason and all that has to happen is let the writers run their course with it. In the meantime, you get to appreciate the relationship for what it is: earnest, sweet, and doomed.

In the most healthy of outlooks that’s how almost all relationships are. After all, despite all the relationships we go through in life only one is going to work out (except in weird religious communities, of course), if any do at all. Sometimes I find myself looking back at old chatlogs and emails with former girlfriends, former almost girlfriends, and former love interests of all sorts. I guess it’s a function of getting older, as well as having found one that things did work out with, that I look back more with a smile than a sneer. Even the ugliest relationship I’ve been in has a sweetness in retrospect. Even Libby and I had our moments, however buried they are in all the acrimony.

The most wise and helpful advice from Evangeline I never took was when she said, “This would all be a lot easier if you would just have some fun.”

If I have any regrets with Eva, it’s not that things didn’t work out (if they had I wouldn’t be married to Clancy, after all). It’s that I failed to enjoy the ride. Being human, I was unable to take a step back and say “I know that things aren’t going to work out, but it will be a beautiful and wonderful thing while it lasts.” I did know that things weren’t going to work out, but it was more with a sense of panic, heartbreak, and loss that I recognized it. I spent many long hours, days, and weeks trying to repair that sinking ship. My main regret was that I spent so much time trying to repair the ship when it would have been so much more fulfilling to be the violin players on the Titanic.

And thus far that’s How I Met Your Mother‘s chief success. It gives us the opportunity to enjoy the ride without regard to whether or not things work out. Quite a gutsy thing for the sitcom to do, but so far it’s working out. And since we know that things did work out with Ted in the end with a woman that he hasn’t met yet, we don’t have to worry about how he’ll come out in the end. I think most of us have a relationship in our past where we were devastated that things didn’t work out, where we know that things might have worked out if things had been slightly different, and where we’re ultimately not sorry that they didn’t.

Viewed in that context, How I Met Your Mother is a romantic sitcom unlike any other I’ve ever seen. I’m looking forward to queueing up the second season and watching it over the next week while I replace all my burned CDs, with more than a few tracks I will always associated with bittersweet, doomed romances of years past.

Many years ago, my best friend Clint was angling to take this girl Cho to the dance. He was genuinely interested in Cho, though she was always a little indifferent to him. And any boy, for that matter. But as the day of the dance rolled closer and Cho didn’t have a date, she got Clint and another suitor to stand back to back. Clint was 1/2″ taller and so Clint was her date. Cho was 6’0″ tall and refused to date any guys shorter than she was. But she’d go to the prom with someone an inch shorter, so long as he was taller than the competition.

My wife Clancy and her mother were at a wedding between a very tall guy and a very short woman. “All that height,” Clancy’s mother lamented, “wasted!”

The other day I wrote about the perils of using a woman’s vulnerabilities to try to get the upper hand. Last night I watched Bloggingheads.tv and was thinking about it today. Megan McArdle, aka Jane Galt, is something like 6’2″. This actually reminded me of something and I found an issue where I do something like that: height.

I am over 6’3″, which isn’t that tall I guess but it’s definitely tall enough to be useful. I discovered sometime after Clint’s brush with Cho that a lot of taller girls can be varying degrees of self-conscious about their height. I don’t know that my height was particularly useful with the ladies most of the time, but it clearly made a difference with tall women.

And I used it to my advantage.

I would never say anything to them about it, of course. If a 6’0″ woman wasn’t interested, I didn’t lecture her about how tough it’s going to be to find another guy as tall as me to ask her out and how without me she would have to make do with a shorter man. It wasn’t anything like that. If they weren’t interested, they weren’t interested. But what I did do is gravitate towards taller women under the assumption that they would be slightly more likely to be interested. I’m not sure that being taller ever helped me date a woman “out of my league”, but it did help.

Clancy is 5’10” and she was (as far as what’s coming to mind right now) the fourth tallest woman that I’d ever dated. Clancy didn’t have a problem dating shorter men, but she has told me on more than one occasion how glad she was to be able to wear heels at her wedding.

So the question that is coming to my mind is that is there any moral difference between what I did (considered women’s insecurities about height when deciding who to talk to at parties and who to flirt with) and what Howard did in In The Company of Men? I’d say that there is one major difference because I never acted or believed that they were lucky to have the interest in someone like me whereas Howard (in a fit of rage, perhaps) did. But looking at it in this light still makes it feel a bit unsavory.

On a sidenote, two of my more serious exes, Julie and Evangeline, were 5’7″ and 5’8″ respectively, so my height was probably not much a factor with either of them. What’s interesting though is that Julie’s next boyfriend and Evangeline’s boyfriend after the boyfriend after me were both 6’6″. The taller girls I dated, Libby, Cecilia, and Brook, followed me up with someone significantly shorter than me and shorter than them.

Among other shows, I’ve been listening to the television show Sports Night. In the mid-to-late second season, two characters end their romance. Natalie scored tickets to some VIP-only club that was opening and she wanted Jeremy, her introvert boyfriend, to go with her. Jeremy reluctantly agreed to go, but spared no quarter in expressing his distaste for such events and the people that attend them. It goes downhill from there.

A few years ago I went to an awkward outing with my ex-girlfriend Julie and her then-current boyfriend Tony. Julie scored some rodeo tickets and Tony wasn’t much in to the rodeo, to say the least. Julie insisted that Tony go and, much like Jeremy, he went only with the condition that he not enjoy himself and express his opinion on this matter in regular intervals. I didn’t know about this little arrangement or else I would have passed on the whole thing.

It’s easy to line up with Julie or Tony (or Natalie or Jeremy) depending on our view of VIP clubs, rodeos, boys, girls, and whichever side of the situation we’ve been on. Ultimately, though, this is a mutual problem in my view. It is actually a sign of a relationship in which both parties are putting their needs before their partner’s, resulting in the ultimate lose-lose situation. Every relationship consists of individual interests as well as group interests. From time to time I like to watch anime and Clancy doesn’t. Clancy enjoys the outdoors and backpacking, which isn’t the sort of thing that I would do on my own. Whether or not the uninterested party partakes in their partners interest is best determined on a case-by-case basis.

For instance, were I in Jeremy’s shoes my stance would be similar. Not my thing, don’t wanna go. Couldn’t enjoy myself if I did go. Would ultimately drag whoever I was with down with me. It would be unavoidable. As such, it would honestly make little sense for me to actually go. Indeed, my partner shouldn’t even want me there. Not only because I might bring her down (even if I wasn’t trying to) but also because I would be completely unhappy throughout the entire thing. In healthy relationships, something like that ought to matter. Natalie offered Jeremy the chance not to go, but she made it clear that she would give him a hard time about it.

Upsetting your partner is unavoidable from time to time. Sometimes it is avoidable but you can’t avoid it because you’re just too angry or upset and that happens, too. But trying to bring your partner down because they’re not doing what you want them to (unless it’s something that needs to be done, of course) is cancerous. Backpacking may not be my thing, but it’s not enough not my thing (as clubbing would be) that I would refuse to go. In fact, I want to go because it would make Clancy happy and that would make me happier than making her go alone even if it meant that I got to be doing things that I would rather do.

In cases where we are going somewhere we’d rather not be for the benefit of our partner, part of going is being as good a sport about it as possible. Tony won no points with his behavior at the rodeo. Point-wise, he honestly would have been better off by refusing to go. In wanting him to go to the rodeo, his enjoyment (or his attempted enjoyment) is implicit in the deal. If he’s not going to try to enjoy it, he does nothing by going except waste everybody’s time (and prevent me from enjoying it in all of the awkwardness).

By the same token, Julie should have seen it coming. Tony isn’t a hard person to read on things like that. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if Tony flat-out said that he would go but wouldn’t enjoy himself. Either way, she knew he wasn’t going to have fun. But still she insisted that he go anyway. I don’t know if she thought he would change his mind once he got there or that he somehow owed it to her to be a good sport. In any case, he didn’t need to be there. She and I could have gone on our own or she could have taken someone else. There were no social expectations. But she got too caught up in the way it should have been (a boyfriend takes his girlfriend to the rodeo) that it ran their relationship ashore for a week or two before things settled down.

On a sidenote, I had absolutely no use for country music prior to meeting Julie. None. It was things like going to the rodeo and watching CMT where I changed my mind on it. I went into it with a much better attitude than Tony and both I and my relationship with Jullie were better off for it. Though perhaps that gave her unrealistic expectations with the more stubborn Tony.

In a thread originally concerning grand theories over at Bobvis, the topic turned to relationship theories. Before Sunrise commented:

I think it just feeds the already insecure people with tactics that don’t always work. Sometimes people just get to the point where they don’t understand why they haven’t met someone decent (at the very least) and so go looking for answers and will probably try anything to succeed in dating.

To which I replied:

Here’s the problem: these books, as obnoxious as they are, are very often reasonably good predictors of human response and behavior.

To which Spungen expressed skepticism and asked for examples.

Before I get started, A story about when it was first suggested that the Earth revolved around the sun instead of vice-versa. The Catholic Church denounced the theory. The Pope, however, was approached by a bunch of mariners that said that using this theory was actually helping them navigate the waters, but they were good Catholics and didn’t want to disregard the Church. The Pope said that if the theory helped them, then they could use it as long as they didn’t believe it.

Also, there’s a movie out there that I have not seen but was explained to me. In the story, a woman ran across a book on how to train dogs and decided to use the lessons on how to train a dog to train her boyfriend. It was a remarkable success. He of course found out about it and was mad and they made up and I assume lived happilly ever after.

I do not, for what it’s worth, believe a woman should think of her man like a dog. I don’t think that she should tream him like a dog. But even though I reject the whole premise of her actions, many of the things that one does with a dog one should also do with a human. Show appreciation and reward desirable behavior. Express disapproval with undesirable behavior in a manner that he will understand, and so on. I don’t advocate to a woman to think of her man as anything but a man, but even if the premise is wrong and offensive, the advice is quite efficient.

I firmly believe that when a relationship between two people is right that games generally do not need to be played. I have driven myself crazy in the past trying to make the unworkable work and it proved, shockingly, unworkable. I have acted very strategically to try to bring relationships together and have met with some success, but the relationships that really matter are more a matter of not blowing it rather than making things work. That’s not to say that even promising relationships aren’t fraught with potential peril, but it is to say that a real relationship is generally so special that the problems presented that prove irreversible harm are special and unique to the relationship involved.

That being said, most relationships are not that unique. In fact, they fall into the category of a cold-blooded negotiation wherein both parties interests never move beyond themselves to the partner or making things work with the partner. As such, the boilerplate solutions presented by relationship gurus come in to play a lot more often than they probably should. And the good books are written by people that have caught the rhythms of these relationship failures and provided ways to avoid pitfalls with a bunch of overgeneralized if-then statements. But far from useless, these books not-infrequently bring to the attention of the reader patterns of human behavior that they could see for themselves if they knew what they were looking for.

So some examples.

John Gray, the author of the Mars & Venus books, is by most accounts a fraud. He got a sham degree from a fake university and used that as a launching pad in to pop psychology. That being said, his books were successful because they resonated with a large number of people. They resonated with a large number of people because they contained a perspective that, for whatever reason, has helped a large number of couples, my ex-girlfriend Julie and I among them.

Whatever Gray’s disqualifications for writing it, what he had to say regarding the mood cycle of women explained a whole lot of how Julie had been acting. the trite metaphor about the wave rising and crashing fit extraordinarily well. Maybe it shouldn’t have taken a book to point it out, but it did. The tidbit about how to listen to a woman when she’s sharing the frustrations of her day helped me stop making her bad days worse by trying to fix her problems for her. And the advice that it gave her, when she took it, was equally helpful. This is all despite the fact that I am hardly a masculine man’s man and she was hardly a southern belle of a woman.

But some of the positive effect it had on my relationship with Julie can be attributed to the fact that we both read it. Perhaps we started responding favorably as Gray said we would because Gray said that we should. I don’t believe that to be the case, but it’s impossible to say, really. But what proved remarkable about it is how a lot of what Gray had to say worked not only with Julie, but with her successors, many of whom detested Gray and swore up and down that he was full of crap.

Not, not everything he had to say worked with every girl I knew. Gray’s advice is built as part of a traditionalist worldview on relationships that I rejected long before I married my strong-headed alphaish doctor of a wife. Some of Gray’s suggestions regarding chivalry would not only have been wasted but resented by some of the women I’ve dated over the years. But on the whole, the advice was spot-on more than it was wrong and a reasonable predictor of what would get a positive reaction and what would get a negative one, what would keep her happy and what wouldn’t. And often quite contrary to what she told me would be the case.

I carry no brief for John Gray. I have no ideological attachment to Mars & Venus. I could care less whether it worked because of the biological differences between men and women or because society has programmed us the way that it has. What I care about is that the advice is, though not 100%, solid.

Doc Love’s The System is another.

To follow Doc Love’s advice is to apply a level a strategy that is unhealthy in a human relationship. The entire enterprise is quite manipulative. A relationship that needs this level of tactics is not likely to be a great one. It takes the thrill out of meeting and falling in love and replaces it with a game of romantic chess. But his analysis of what works and what doesn’t has proven (to me, anyway) remarkably adept.

Beware giving someone what they say they want. What a woman says that she values in a guy and what she actually places a value on are two separate things. This is no less true for men, but Doc Love gives advice to men for women and not vice-versa. When women say that they want a man that is open and honest and affectionate, they want a man that will be those things eventually. A guy that is those things too early throws everything off balance and runs the risk of coming across as desperate, insecure, and needy.

A lot of women will get impatient as a guy opens up slowly, but this is exactly as it should be whether she realizes it or not (sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t). Relationships often continue to unfold most successfully as she emotionally pries bit by bit as he lets out the rope hand by hand. If he moves too quickly or doesn’t move at all, problems will ensue.

This was, I have to say, a mistake that I made repeatedly. I’m a pretty open guy. I honestly enjoy expressing myself, it’s why I write! Far from being to my benefit, however, it was torpedoing chances that I might have otherwise had. Spungen is quick to point out that it’s usually the case that a chance was never had, but all I can say in my defense that in my case it was verified later, when I was more cautious and things did actually start happening (or she wanted them to but I lost interest).

The last one is the infamous Ladder Theory.

Every election people love to throw out worthless data predicting the winner of the election. Sometimes it’s that when this football team beats that football team the Republican wins and other times it’s the winner of some state will win the whole election. What they say is true, but they present it as though it’s proof that there is a connection (there is obviously a connection between Missouri’s electoral votes and the ultimate winner, of course, but it’s no more than Missouri’s electoral votes added to its winner’s totals).

The most interesting ones are the ones that track economic models. They vouch 100% accuracy in predicting who won past elections. This was repeated over and over again as proof that Al Gore would dominate the 2000 election. Whatever you think of that election, we should all be able to agree that Gore did not do as well as the economic model suggested he would. Why not? Well, because the economic model was based on the very elections it’s being judged against. The 2000 election wasn’t a part of those calculations because it hadn’t happened yet. If it were it would have changed the “foolproof” formula.

I mention that because The Ladder Theory has the same problem. It attempts to explain what has happened and then establish a causal effect even where one doesn’t exist.

The Ladder Theory was written by a bitter guy that wanted to explain away his romantic failures. It is primarily boosted by bitter guys that want their relationship failures to not be their fault and rely on a not-so-thinly veiled mysogynistic theory to do so. Personally, I got no problem accepting my role in all of my romantic failures. My theory has always been that if it was something I did, it’s something that I can avoid doing next time (by either not screwing up a chance I had or not wasting my time with a chance I never had).

I also think that The Ladder Theory is problematic in its essence. It places far too much emphasis on money and power and makes no mention of personal charm and charisma (which comes in varieties other than dominating). It also presents both men and women as automatons incapable of independent thought and direction.

But despite the relatively warped view of men and women, the notion of two ladders and an abyss is in my mind indisputable. A lot of guys make the mistake of thinking that if they just get close enough to a woman they can be promoted to romantic interest when in fact personal interest and romantic interest are two separate things. I am (I hope) on the “friend” ladder of all the women I know. I can become extremely close to one or two, but because I am married I will never end up on the other ladder. It’s nothing personal. It’s not a rejection of their worth or what they mean to me or vice-versa, it just is.

But it doesn’t have to be marriage that sticks a guy on the “Friends” ladder. I once had a female friend that I was crazy about. I wanted to be a heck of a lot more than friends, but for a variety of reasons I wasn’t what she was looking for romantically. I wasn’t Catholic, I’ve never had a small frame, I think quietly more than I talk, and the list goes on and on. She really did like me a lot and it was nothing personal. But I never had a shot.

When a guy is at the top of the friendship ladder, he can’t just keep climbing to the relationship ladder. He has to either stay where he is or take a leap. And if the leap fails, which it probably will, he will have to accept being in the abyss (which is basically out of her life) or climbing back up the Friends ladder. Not because she’s a meanie-poo (as The Ladder Theory might suggest) but because he took the leap. Envisioning the ladders, the abyss, and the leap, is an extraordinarily helpful model even if I don’t buy in to the bitterness of the theory as a whole.

In a couple of cases I was on the friendship ladder, jumped for the relationship one and missed. Ironically, in my two most dramatic tumbles I ultimately did end up on the relationship ladder. In other words I became the object of their romantic affections. When all of this was happening, I didn’t understand what was happening or why. I didn’t understand how I had gotten into a position both enviable and maddening. Or where that position was or how far it was from where I wanted to be. The Ladder Theory’s model explained it and once I was familiar with it I had a visual model as I watched other people do what I had attempted to do (or not do).

Anyway, the point that I am making is that oftentimes these things persist because they explain things that are in a way that people can understand. They’re varying degrees of imperfect, mind you, but they are often better indicators of what different people will do (or should do) in circumstances than the people themselves.

Both Abel and Spungen express some curiosity about my previous comment that the pot-smokers that I knew in Mormon-dominated Deseret were generally cooler than those I knew in southern Colosse and, for that matter, southwestern Estacado.

I first started smoking on a bet that went horribly wrong, but one of the things that kept me going was the social aspect of it. Many years ago, when such things existed, my family sat in the smoking section in a cruise ship dining room. Every time we did that there seemed to be at least one person or couple that didn’t smoke. Why did they sit at the smoking table? Better conversation. Better enough that they were willing to pollute their lungs for it!

Until I moved to Deseret, smoking was generally a social activity. This was particularly true in college at Southern Tech. To be blunt, smoking automatically weeded out the stick-in-the-muds. Not all non-smokers are stick-in-the-muds, of course. Most aren’t. But the number of members among the uptight population find it prudent and worthwhile to light something on fire and breathe in the fumes purposefully. So, in addition to the fact that we would light something on fire and breathe in the smoke, public smokers have something almost instantly in common with one another: Not likely to be stick-in-the-muds.

The same is true, to an extent, of drinking. Other than those that like the taste, people that drink want to relax. People that don’t want to relax don’t drink. People that are really concerned about getting a little too loose and doing something a little (or a lot) unwieldy don’t drink. So drinkers have in common the desire, to an extent, to cut loose.

Though I’m sure social scientists have a precise term for it, smoking and drinking are what I will call social identifiers.

Pot smoking is also a social identifier. However, due largely to the fact that it is illegal, it identifies a different social group. In addition to those that just like pot but not alcohol, it includes people that find some Higher Purpose in flouting the rules. It includes people that don’t want to do what Daddy tells them to do. It includes not just people that want to cut loose (cause most could do that with alcohol, if they wanted to) but people that have their priorities positioned in such a way that they are willing to risk a criminal record in order to do so. Following society’s rules when it comes to drugs and alcohol is not a particularly difficult task from the outset (different of course once you’re addicted), but they decline to do so.

In the land of Deseret, smoking and drinking have entirely different implications than they do in the rest of the Land of the Free. First and foremost, they signal that you are either not a Mormon or not a very good one. The significance of this cannot be understated. If you are drinking or smoking, particularly in public, you are signalling that you are not a part of the dominant culture. But unlike society’s general rules with drugs and alcohol, being a Mormon is a much more difficult task. For one thing, it requires a particular set of beliefs. You believe in the Bible, more or less, as well as the Mormon addenda thereto. Furthermore, you believe the church is the ultimate arbiter of things that are theologically true. If you’re a southern protestant, you can bounce around until you find a church that reflects your beliefs. Not so easy if you’re LDS.

So while you have to actively do something to become a social outlaw (using the term loosely, of course) in most of the country. In Deseret, you simply only have to not do enough. Stop going to church in the South, people may assume you started going to a different one. You generally don’t get to choose which LDS church you go to (it’s districted off like schools) and it’s quite possible you’ll end up with a Missionary on your doorstep if you stop going to church there (as happened to a couple pot-smoking friends).

I mentioned in the original comment that my coworker Simon thought that there were as many potsmokers out there as drinkers and more pot smokers than cigarette smokers. Why? Because everyone he knew that drank did pot. I had to actively convince him that it was just not like that across the country.

Once you’re outside social normity, it’s a lot easier to stray further from camp. The punk movement is absolutely huge in the Mormon capital at least partially in backlash to what is percieved to be (though isn’t really, anymore, at least in that city) the dominant culture. When you’re already crossed the line, there’s much less holding you back from going further.

The Deseretian pot-smokers are cooler because they’re former Mormons. Being a former Mormon (or a non-Mormon) in itself doesn’t make one cool. It’s certainly not the pot-smoking that makes them cool. It’s that, generally speaking, the socially relaxed people that are drinking and smoking in the south are also smoking pot in Deseret, whereas pot smoking in the south is more generally reserved for the agitated and the completely disaffected. In short, people like Carol Goddard are the unusual rather than the typical.

Some guy named Thomas says the following about people with an INTJ typology:

… if you encounter an INTJ (Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging), there is a 37% probability that his IQ places him in the top 2 percent of the population. The probability is 20% for an INTP, 15% for an INFJ, and 8% for an INFP. These four types account for 66% of the high-IQ population but only 6% of the total population.

Which leaves this INTJ to wonder whether he is a monumental underachiever or if rather just unusually stupid.

To be filed under “some things don’t change”, there was an interesting conversation over at Bobvis about how to repel loser guys. The conversation turned to guys that are attracted to the vulnerable:

Even if the general pool of men is only 10 percent these guys, a woman will find herself surrounded by them in certain circumstances(sort of a buzzard effect) that have nothing to do with how she acts or the sort of men she prefers. Being dumped in a bad way by some other guy can bring them on, or any other situation in which the woman may be considered damaged goods.

As long as angry men remain a social and professional liability, women will continue to be indirect about rejection. The more vulnerable in a situation we think we’re in, the less direct we’ll be.

My mother was a young divorcee in California in the seventies. Divorce wasn’t as normalized then as it is now, so it represented a hurdle when it came to finding another partner. A man (or woman, though women might have been more forgiving in this regard) was much more likely to decline to consider marrying someone that had been married before. Among other things, it confirmed that she wasn’t a virgin.

Of course, living in southern California, this was less a problem than it might have been if she were still living in Carolina. What she did run across quite frequently, though, were the buzzards that Spungen refers to. A whole lot of guys thought that she might be awfully lonely since divorcees were supposed to be wilted flowers, damaged goods, and desperate. Some even used the “you must miss sex a whole lot (you poor thing)” to try to get her in to bed.

My mother has her faults, but a wilting flower has never, ever been among them.