I love the fact that there are people that follow their dreams and shoot for the moon. We would be bereft of innovation, art, and so on if everyone accepted a nice comfy cubicle. But I would expect most of the people who manage such feats to be the sorts of people who simply couldn’t do anything else. And if you can’t do anything else, you have to do what you can. Whenever I used to go to anime/sci-fi conventions, I would get irritated with writers on the peril would invariably open their panels saying how terrible it is to be a writer and that you should do something else. Better advice, in retrospect, was given by some in the form of “If you can do something else, then do something else. Writing is for people who are so overwhelmed by the need to write that they cannot do anything else.”

Beyond that, though, don’t follow your dreams. Screw your dreams. While you should do what you can do avoid what you hate – if for no other reason than that if you hate it, you won’t be good at it and if you won’t be good at it you probably won’t advance in it – the most important part of life, to me, is what you come home from the job to.

Further, the notion that you should love your work only works if you actually succeed in doing what it is you want to do. Sometimes you shoot for the moon and don’t make it, you can more easily end up in the deadly abyss in space instead of on the moon or another star. Or you can miss entirely, and plummeting back to earth in a stunning death. Okay, maybe I am taking the metaphor too far, but you get the idea. If you go into fashion design, you may become a fashion designer, or you may be relegated to something less pleasant than what you would be doing if you had simply signed on to a more conventional career track.

I have seen people become far less than they could be because they came to the conclusion that the decision not to follow your dreams would actually be a failure to follow your dreams, which is a mentality that is toxic. So it’s no surprise that I read favorably Miya Tokumitsu’s admonition against telling people to “doing what you love” (DWYL), which she considers to be classist and exploitive:

Superficially, DWYL is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? And who is the audience for this dictum?

DWYL is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

I don’t come at it from quite the lefty perspective as Tokumitsu, which leaves me less than concerned about the exploitation angle. There is a cost with everything, and with doing what you love it’s having to accept the concessions of being in a very competitive field. That’s why following your dreams is often a bad idea for a lot of people, but not why it’s a bad idea for society as a whole. The class element, though, is more significant.

Following your dreams is a fantastic idea if you have a trust fund. It’s also a fantastic idea if you have upper class social networks that can help you in your career or catch you if you fall. The belief that one should follow one’s dreams come-what-may is impossible to separate from a sense of security that a lot of people lack. When I look at my peers in the upper middle class, a differentiation between “follow your dreams” and “get a job” is a sense of financial vulnerability. While I myself come from a family where my father had a good government salary and a good salary, I was also born into a family where my parents were raised poor or lacked that economic security. I was raised with that insecurity and the belief that “No, just because you try your best and follow your own path does not mean things will work themselves out” even though, in retrospect, the odds that they would, for me, are better than they are for a lot of people.

James Joyner argues that even when people say that you should follow your dreams that they’re not saying that you’re a failure if you don’t, but the undercurrent is there. Not unlike how “We should encourage (almost) everyone to go to college” inadvertently signifies that people who didn’t go to college failed to go to college. If we associate the path to happiness with goals that so often rely on luck, social networking, and a money cushion, we’re defining goals upwards in a way that will be detrimental to more people than helpful. A stronger safety net can only help with one of the three. All of this is especially true when supply far outstrips demand for certain career paths.

Which brings us to the other bit that a lot of people (including Joyner and Lion) are criticizing, which is that somebody has to do the grunt work – which they are unlikely to love – so that Steve Jobs can live his dream. Especially poor people in China. This part resonates less with me than with others, however, because it touches on such cosmic injustices that the failure of a Chinese sweatshop worker to pursue their dreams is putting the First World Problem stamp on people with much greater problems. It leads us down a path most of us (excluding Jacobins, to be fair) are not seriously willing to go, to the point that the argument strikes me mostly as a distraction to the conversation between the people actually having the conversation with one another.

Andrew Simmons makes a class argument when it comes to college:

My students are understandably preoccupied with money. They don’t have the privilege to not worry about it. They fantasize about what their future wealth will permit them to enjoy. They dream about specific models of cars in certain colors and gargantuan houses in particular neighborhoods and opulent meals at their favorite restaurants any time they wish. Many swoon over the East Coast liberal arts colleges they visit on the special trips that my school is thoughtful enough to arrange. Colleges like Swarthmore and Haverford fly students like Isabella out during college applications season. A few are accepted but most attend state schools, which, especially in California, can provide excellent educational opportunities. The irony, though, is that many of these students aspire to go to a liberal-arts school but don’t necessarily understand its significance. They’re drawn to sleepy quads, weathered brick, and cascading ivy, but they are resolutely pre-professional in spirit.

In contrast, at the private school I attended for the last two years of high school, my classmates thought about what they wanted to learn in college, not only what they wanted to become. Some knew medical or law school loomed in the future, but they thought about the work in a different way. My privileged classmates enjoyed money, from what I could tell. A few reveled in their cars and clothes, but most appeared to take it for granted. They didn’t talk about it. Instead, a future doctor talked about working at the CDC to fight public health epidemics. A future lawyer envisioned starting a defense firm to provide a service to the hometown community. Most of us wanted to do something special.

He seems to be treating his private school as the norm, rather than his economically insecure students. I would wager “college as getting ahead” is actually more commonplace than “want to do something special.”

The desire to follow one’s dreams, to do what you love, and to do something special, are typically luxuries of economic comfort and should be, in my mind, generally viewed as such. I think it’s great that he has a student that has an eye on the “economic security” ball and also wants to accomplish more. But if there’s one that should be strongly emphasized, it’s not doing something special. It’s taking care of your business and being in a position to take care of your family

The aspirational ideology is problematic because it designs success and failure in such a way that places a moral or spiritual value on aspects of life that they are particularly well-positioned to pursue. There is an implicit declaration of a shortcoming, or emptiness, on the part of those that are not afforded such luxuries. I would argue that there is far more honor in going in every day to a job that you don’t like than there is spiritual value in dedicating yourself to the ethereal career path, and in my personal hierarchy the starving artist is subordinate to the bored IT guy who jams on weekends.

The Onion, in its almighty wisdom, had it right: Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life.

According to The Atlantic, they used to be different:

This year, most Americans will resolve forthwith to do some permutation of “getting fit” or “losing weight.”

But New Year’s resolutions predate our modern-day weight concerns by centuries.

So, what did people resolve before we had the scourge of cellulite and the temptation of McRib to stir us to action?

The answer: just to be a better person, apparently. Resolutions from the early 20th century ranged from swearing less, to having a more cheerful disposition, to recommitting to God.

I consider most of these to be better than the “lose weight” one. Of course, if I had a new years resolution, it would be… to lose some of the previously lost weight that has been creeping back on.

I’d also like to be more vigilant with Hit Coffee.

What, if any, new year resolutions did you make?

A little while ago, one Seth Adam Smith wrote a piece that became a meme entitled “Marriage Isn’t For You.”

This was passed around among people I know, approvingly, though started to get some pushback. Kyle Cupp said (among other things):

[T]his advice is a recipe for abuse because it’s so easy to turn around: You shouldn’t be concerned with your own happiness, dear, but with mine. It’s not selfish to care about your own happiness. And, yes, selfishness isn’t good for marriage, but then neither is self-neglect. Smith is, unwittingly I’m sure, advising a disposition of self-neglect. That’s hugely problematic.

I get what Cupp and other detractors are saying, but I look at it another way. Similar to something I was told along the way: You should be responsible for 75% of the work in a relationship. Why? Not so that you can take on the lion’s share. Rather, because there are a lot of things that your partner is doing that you don’t realize, and if you think you’re going about 75% of the work in a relationship, you’re probably doing about half.

Smith’s advice is terrible for some people. For instance, if you have a martyr complex, you shouldn’t think about the marriage as being for the other person. Really, the same is true if you find yourself taken advantage on a regular basis, this advice isn’t for you. Rather, this is good advice for most people who sometimes lose sight of the grant scheme of things and are asking what they get out of a particular arrangement. That’s a recipe for thinking that you’re doing 50% when you’re actually only doing about 30% or so.

I actually agree with the bulk of Phi’s post on sexual market value, taking issue with a chart that appears to show roughly equal SMV among men and women over lifespans, but with women peaking sooner than men. Phi’s objections seem to be (1) the chart assumes equal buying power among both sexes, and (2) a lack of recognition on the chart for de-facto polygamy.

I’d argue that these two, to the extent that they exist, are actually functions of the same thing. Which is to say that if women are in general less excited about casual sex (more on the casualness in a minute, as well as the reasons for lack of excitement), then it absolutely makes sense that they would be more discriminating. And that in a buyer’s market, they would hold out for better while men who are not better would be forced to shop “downmarket”[1].

If you’re a guy whose primary purpose is looking to get laid, this is a problem. I’d argue, though, that the problem is with male priorities far more than it is with female priorities. Both from the guys at the top who are apparently too indiscriminate if they are sexing downmarket, to the midmarket and downmarket guys who are feeling shafted by being unable to have sex with women like the upmarket guys can.

I focus on casual sex because that’s where a lot of the numbers are going to be moved. I’m defining casual sex as that which is (a) outside that of a committed relationship of even the medium-term, (b) outside that of a new relationship that is reasonably expected to become a committed relationship. Aspirational sex, wherein someone holds the feint hope that a relationship will occur due to the sex that is occurring, is mostly folded in with casual sex provided that there is not a reasonable basis to assume that the goal is going to be attained in this manner. “Casual” is not actually the best word here because sometimes it’s anything but, but it’s the word that I have.

While most sex might not be casual sex, I suspect that most partnerings will be. People who have sex inside a committed or forming relationship are more likely to have a single partner for a duration of some degree while those of more casual inclinations will be having multiple partners. To use a personal example, I had one partner over the course of multiple years, followed by more than one partner over a much shorter timespan, eventually followed by my marriage and the one partner I have had since. There are exceptions to this (I have a friend who had more sexual partners during the course of a particular relationship than he’d had prior to it and than I think he has had since…), but as a general rule I think it holds.

While I’m not sure how sexual value is being defined here, I’d assume it’s some variation of “quality and quantity of sexual opportunities a man or woman has.” This being a value regardless of whether actual “sales” are made. AC Green and Tim Tebow are both likely to have very high SMV, even if the former remained a virgin until marriage and the latter is still one[2]. Even so, society often makes these determinations based on results. And, to an extent, sales are a function of selling, so we judge male sexual value by conquests. So we might judge someone who’s had twenty partners as having a higher value than someone who has had five, even though the former has such a high count because he “put himself out there” to a greater degree than the latter, either because of extroversion, different priorities, or fewer monogamous relationships of any length.

All of which is to say, it’s complicated. To bring us back to the main point, it is perfectly rational for women to withhold sex except when it is particularly worth their while. When it’s a particularly hot guy. When it’s a guy with whom there is substantial relationship potential. This is true for a variety of reasons, but mostly because when we look at the consequences of casual sex, they fall disproportionately on women[3]. We can talk about the specific risks men do face, but the more we rack them up, the more it becomes apparent that men should be more particular than they are. Men should hold out for either upmarket women, or women with whom they have a significant bond (making it no longer casual, of course).

Casual sex isn’t the same as committed sex, of course. So what I say above is of little help for the guy who says “But it wasn’t about casual sex to begin with. I’m looking for a relationship and the sexual marketplace – and the extent to which it has become a marketplace – has made all of this harder.”

To which, I am actually sympathetic. I think there is a problem here, in that since they are two different things, we’re not exactly talking about a singular marketplace anymore. We’re talking about the car rental market on one hand, and a car lot on the other.

There is a tendency to want to say “But women really desire in a mate the same thing they desire in a sexual partner.” That when women settle down with a different kind of mate than they slept with, it was because they dialed back expectations and wouldn’t have, if only they’d had the option. This is true for some, trivially true for most, and false for many. Some young women – like young men – never switch gears from asking “Is this a person I like getting hot and heavy with?” to “Is this a person I want to spend the rest of my life with?” It’s trivially true for most in the same sense that if they had the choice between hot good marriage material and fair good marriage material, they’d take the former (who wouldn’t? Except…). Others take a different track entirely, being suspicious of hot products more generally.

Phi’s previous (exemplary) post on moral universalism vs. particularism touches on this, and hits a perfectly true note for a lot of people (men and women, though in my observation more frequently the latter, YMMV). There’s an old saying that women get married believing he will change and men get married believing that she won’t (and they’re both wrong). But I have to say, that’s really not how it seems to have unfolded in the longer game. Among my cohort, at least. By and large, the majority of people I know settled down with people whom they were equally yoked (to repurpose a biblical saying). Lessons learned and people moved on.

The pathway to get there has winners and losers. Guys like Phi that probably would have preferred to settle down sooner (though a lot of the resentful had a… different set of priorities). I get the sense that a lot of the resentment I see is directed at women who take advantage of their increased leverage in their early to mid-twenties only to shut down the game and get married right when that leverage is gone. It’s an interesting narrative, and compelling from the guy’s point of view, but it doesn’t fully account for the ways that sex is logistically and socially (and perhaps emotionally) different. It seems a bit like looking back at my time with Evangeline and saying “See? He got all that excitement before finally settling down with a doctor!” There’s not a false word in there, but the narrative doesn’t actually capture the story. In my experience, my Story of Wasted Time is not all that different than women’s Story of Wasted Time. I can’t say that I’m entirely sorry for having gone through it[4], but its ignoble conclusion was not a tribute to lost leverage and a matter of settling.

All of which points to the downside of the new paradigm. Or the many downsides, plural. Doubtless, the answer for many is for women to gear their sexual activity towards the range of guys they are likely to marry (or as Phi would likely have it, not engage in sex at all until marriage). While I’d disagree with the parenthetical, I think there is something towards that so long as we include guys in the criticism. It would be a better world had my count were half of what it is, limited only to forward-minded encounters or special circumstances. It also would have been a better world where I hadn’t felt the pressure to be and remain sexually active to the extent that I did, and a better world where young women weren’t under similar pressure (from the same source, though a different direction). It’s not really the world we live in, though, and there is a lot of blame to go around for that and only a minority portion, if that, towards the sexual decisions of women.

[1] I’m not entirely conceding that this is the case. Sometimes it is. Particularly for those guys who want sex at more regular intervals. For my part, most of my relatively small selection of partners were roughly in range of my place in the pecking order. It is the case, though, that if I were to want to have sex as available to me as it would be to my female counterpart, I’d have had to sacrifice my standards a great deal more than I did. And that itself probably wouldn’t have been enough. I’d probably have had to pay for it.

[2] I don’t know if that’s true, but we don’t hear otherwise, which suggests that he has at least kept it to a minimum. I suspect that if he were promiscuous, that is something the media would find very interesting in a way that they don’t find interesting for other athletes. Ditto for Green, who was very vocal about his virginity and scores of women did not step forward.

[3] Women get pregnant while men do not. STD transmission is more likely from male to female than the reverse. Women face greater social scrutiny for prolific sexual behavior. Women are put in a position to be raped in ways that men are not, generally. There are ways in which they do have advantages, such as statutory rape when they are young and a greater degree of control over reproduction, but they simply don’t stack up nearly as high, in my view.

[4] There’s a bit of a paradox involved. If I hadn’t gone through it, I wouldn’t be a person who could be sorry for going through it.

No great surprise: Facebook knows who you’re dating:

Though 27% of Facebook users don’t list their relationship status at all, only about half of those people are single, according to a Men’s Health article. If you’re one of these users committing the crime of omission, Facebook’s team of “in-house sociologists” has been researching ways to find you out. […]

f you’re “friends” with several of your other half’s co-workers, family members and friends, for example, Facebook may deduce that your only mutual link to these profiles is your assumed wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend. Researchers said they had a high success rate in correctly guessing someone’s romantic partner by this method.

Of course, these types of sleuthy Facebook social science projects have been ongoing for some time now. A research project earlier this year from Cambridge claimed it had success detecting non-volunteered information like users’ sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views just from what people “liked” on the site.

This opens up a potentially crucial role for Facebook in the human social domain. You know what I always hated about relationships? I hated trying to nail down where exactly things stood. I’ll bet there is a lot of potential here for Facebook to tell you. Or they can at least give you a heads up. “In case you were unaware, statistically speaking, you are in a relationship with Suzie.” It would be a very helpful pointer for the unaware.

Of course, you could decide that you don’t want to be in a relationship with Suzie at all. And you can say “Facebook! You’re wrong!” But you ought to make sure that Suzie thinks that Facebook is wrong, too. It could have a real positive social impact of making us have the very important conversation that some are too good at avoiding. Among other things, that’s one of the things I consider great about the institution of marriage. It seems to break up more relationships than it saves, sometimes. But! It helps those who were going to break up later realize that they need to break up sooner.

On the other hand, Facebook can’t figure out which movies I want to see. So maybe it would be in over its head here.

On a more serious note, it rather blows my mind that they haven’t gone hog wild of matchmaking. I met Evangeline (as well as Porky, the girl who was way out of my league) on something that was actually somewhat like Facebook, though only a little. It wasn’t a full-on social networking site, but it wasn’t a matchmaking site either. Since it wasn’t the latter, it made trading messages a lot less formal and more friendly than on the matching sites I was on at the time. The creators of that site are probably kicking themselves for falling just shy of what Facebook became. Now it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry and the domain points to Teen.com.

-{This was originally posted at Ordinary Times. As this post involves immigration and such, and since the previous prohibition on discussing race and immigration has been cautiously lifted when on-topic, those subjects are obviously not off-limits. I do ask that they be approached with some care.}-

Sometimes it seems as though live in two realities. Well, one reality, at a fork in the road, leading to two opposite futures. Earth 1 faces a future that is heavily automated. So automated, in fact, that we cannot realistically find enough self-supporting work for everybody. Not that there wouldn’t be things for people to do in exchange for money, but the market wages they get would be insufficient to be able to afford a lifestyle that we would consider to be respectable and reasonable. It is because of this that I sometimes think we need to divorce the notion of work and self-sufficiency. That, even if “the 53%” statistic wasn’t deeply misleading, it would be a blinkered way to look at it so long as we assume that most the remaining 47% were working, had retired from a lifetime of work, or were on the road to working. If there are more people than market-adding places to put them, I simply can’t view people as the problem. (more…)

-{Note, this one was sitting in “Drafts” though I thought I had actually posted it. My apologies if it is a repeat.}-

Hugo Schwyzer can’t take a compliment. When people point out that he and his wife are the type of people that should be having children, he feels that’s wrong because it suggests that others should not. When people point out the blueness of his little one’s eyes, he concerned about the view that there’s something wrong with brown eyes. There are, arguably at least, racial implications to this. The implicit assumption that “lighter” is better and that eye colors found generally on whiter people is considered better than eye color on darker people.

I’m not going to say that there’s nothing to the racial argument. Blue eyes are associated in the eyes of some as a sign of racial purity.

But I think that a good part of it at least is that brown is not a compelling color, generally speaking. I personally don’t have strong preferences in the area of eye color, but it’s not hard to see why blue is preferable by many to brown. There’s a reason why this blog’s background is blue. Why blue is used on Hugo’s blog, for that matter, and on our flag and in 100,000 other ways that brown is not. Blue is a special color.

I am relatively confident in discounting race as a motive because I am almost positive that if black folks generally had a beautiful golden color eye, you’d see a lot more attention being drawn to it. I could see my mother, who was vocal about her desire that my brothers and I marry whites, seeing the possibility of our children getting golden eyes as an upside if we were to have defied her on that.

The other thing is that my blue eyes garner notice and there doesn’t seem to be any connection between women that have racially suspect views and women that point them out. The two that were most fawning about them had previously dated a black man and an Arab respectively and neither made any great see-I’m-not-racist point of mentioning it.

The fact that my eyes are blue I guess could be said to make me biased, but my wife’s eyes are brown and if she offered to wear blue-colored contacts I wouldn’t take her up on it (unless it were something that she wanted to do). I am kind of glad that Lain got my blue eyes because I did want to pass that on. I would not be disappointed if the others had her brown eyes or some other variation.

Cobb talks of aging, respect, and knowing where you are:

It hit me almost at once that I was in America. The America I remember from before 9/11 when I used to think about the wonderment of fancy restaurants. In any fancy American restaurant, the guy two tables away from you just might be a multimillionaire. Of course that truth remained after 9/11 but we started getting all dysfunctional about what America meant. I’m talking about the open society that we still are. Free parking on the street in Carmel.

One of the things I remember most about that book I read about the rich, the wealthy and the super wealthy was that a lot of the wealthy are pretty peculiar folks, meaning that they are the guy who spent 20 years perfecting goat cheese, or ball bearings. If you were the guy who invented the Maglite, you started off with a dream to have a really good flashlight and then one day everybody in law enforcement wanted one. Four years later, you’re a regular old guy with time and millions to burn in Carmel. You go to all the Red Sox games. You buy the wife a new Benz. Yeah the watch costs 6 thousand, but whatever. You just buy stuff that works, not all that flash. You can find things out if you really want to know. You have time. You have money. You have patience. You’re not under pressure to make a whole lot of mistakes. You appreciate a good meal. You realize you have been blessed, and you take your freedom seriously. By my reckoning, a reasonable man, once rich, will get over the hump and mellow out or wreck his life within 5 years.

Separately, he wrote this:

A bucket list is not a good way to think of maturity. Adding adventure is for young men. For old men it’s about subtracting the useless. It’s about not being restless for action for it’s own sake. It’s about not letting desire to prove something get in the way of just doing something. For me, being this age is about your ability to know the truth of your life’s experience and always tell that truth. But also being prepared if everybody else does that or if nobody else does that.

Being still relatively young, I don’t have a whole lot to say on the meat of his post except that I am going to really, really try to remember that paragraph from the second post. But while I am relatively young, I am passing the point where I am young.

I have something of an egalitarian streak. And I have a preference for the casual. I don’t like pretension. Yet at the same time, I do have relatively inegalitarian and more rigid views on self-presentation. At some point, I am going to need to go through and cull my wardrobe. With the exception of things that don’t fit, one of the things I am going to be looking at more closely are those things that are age-appropriate. Once upon a time, I found the perfect clubbing shirt. I didn’t wear it clubbing, because I rarely went clubbing, but I still wore it around. But that is a shirt for a man in his twenties, which I am not anymore in body or spirit. A few years ago I tried to grow my hair out. It wasn’t successful, but that was just as well because I was already too old for long hair.

There’s something about the agebending that Rufus talked about here that I am not sure I will ever be comfortable with. This is true of how we behave and how we dress. For some reason, it’s the latter that bothers me more. I mean, if you’re in your thirties or forties and you enjoy video games or superhero movies, well that’s what you enjoy. There is something tragic about being expected not to. Life is too short. But appearance? That strikes me as a place where it’s quite easy to conform. To avoid being that fifty year old guy with the ear-ring. But the expectation is lost.

Cobb also talks quite a bit about class. In addition to abandoning my night-club shirt, I also find myself becoming more particular when it comes to certain things in part because it feels wrong for myself, the husband of a doctor, a father, and a degreed individual, to dress a way that I am not. When I can come up with a utilitarian reason for it, such as my famous steel-toed boots, I do it without shame. But other than that, I feel like one of the minimal obligations of my fortunate life is to at least nominally live up to it. My twenty year old self would have called it elitism or snobbery. But in a way, it’s the other way around. It’s not a disrespect of myself to downgrade my appearance with holey jeans or gas station shirts. Rather, it’s a disrespect to the people for whom these things are authentic. For me, it is not. It feels like pretending not to acknowledge this.

A little while ago, Slate had a series on marriage that poked at some concerns that folks like myself have about liberals and marriage. But some of them left the hair on the back of my neck firmly resting. One of them involved David Plotz writing about wedding guests:

When you are in the throes of wedding planning—the epic, Iranian-nuke-level negotiations with your fiancée about invitations, the masterful diagramming of every possible seating permutation to maximize hookups and minimize family arguments—it seems inconceivable that somewhere in this group, the group of people that you are closest to in the entire world, the people with whom you will share the most extraordinary moment of your life, are dear friends you will never see again after your wedding day. You don’t know who the last-timers are—in fact, you can’t know—but they will be there on the dance floor and in photos. And suddenly, one day—two, five, 20 years on—you will think to yourself: I haven’t seen her since our wedding. And then: How did that happen?

When I talk about last-timers, I don’t mean those old friends of your parents who got invited over your protests. Of course you’ll never see them again. I also don’t mean the various disposable plus-ones. Any wedding of any size will be populated by boyfriends, girlfriends, and even spouses who will have been dumped or divorced by the next time you see your friend. My brother-in-law’s then-fiancée is all over our wedding photos. She was on her last legs as a fiancée, but we didn’t know it at the time. Sweet, kind Liane: Where are you now?

Some people focus on Friends From The Present. My brother Mitch did that.

This was a way in which my wedding different from my brother Mitch’s (Ollie had two weddings, one like mine and one like Mitch’s). Mitch focused on Friends From The Present. I focused on Friends From the Past. I invited people I hadn’t seen in years. I hadn’t invited people I considered myself close to at the time. Not that I would have protested the latter’s presence. But I had an inkling that things would probably break off whenever I next moved away. Or I wasn’t sure. But the people I hadn’t seen for years, and who I thought to myself “I really want them to come” were people that I knew I had relationships with that were far from circumstantial or relationships of convenience.

According to experts, both of these are wrong. The focus was supposed to be on Friends From The Future. Like Plotz, I just can’t agree with this due to the lack of a crystal ball. I mean, a part of my rationale of Friends Of The Past was that I was projecting future friendship based on past performance, to a degree. But as much as that, my motivation was that they could see the capstone of the person I was when they knew me. When I ceased to be that person and became a person that was enjoined with another person. In some cases, it truly didn’t matter if I would see them again. They had invested enough in me and who I was that I felt an invitation was something of an obligation. I invited some people I am not sure I really cared if I would ever see again, but whose role in my life demanded their invitation.

Of course, in the age of Facebook, the question of the future is somewhat even more moot than Plotz suggests. These days, you end up keeping track of people long after you would have in yesteryear, but only if they regularly Facebook or remain tied to you online in some other way (an online community).

Your result for The 4-Variable IQ Test…

Interpersonal

30% interpersonal, 25% visual, 30% verbal and 15% mathematical!

Take The 4-Variable IQ Test at HelloQuizzy