All That She Wants Is Another Baby

Headline from twenty years hence:

Woman Conceives: Father Admits to Lying About Birth Control. 

I guess that male chemical contraception - by pill or injection - isn't far away.

You can picture it now: A couple arrive at her apartment in a cab, all bra-straps and breathless. They can't take their hands off each other. On the ride up in the elevator, they grind in the corner. Inside, they pause for a moment on the threshold, kissing deeply. She takes him by the hand to her bedroom. Clothes come off, then she stops:

"You are firing blanks, aren't you?" She asks.

He smiles smugly. "Of course. I had my HeroShot last week. I'm good 'til June."

"In that case....c'mere and fuck me" she growls.


Fortunes can be made if you can predict headlines from the future. The difficult ones will make you the most, easier ones not so much. Even I can predict those, like the one I opened with. The trend of women adopting male behaviour is well entrenched. Rates of binge drinking, violence and infidelity among women are heading towards those of men, presumably a consequence of the move to "gender equality", although quite what women gain from equality in these areas escapes me.

The other social elephant in the room is the fact of declining birthrates. Now that's been a kind of under-the-fold headline for a decade or so, but I predict that too will change. (Making my opening headline even more prescient, BTW.) Western countries face huge problems with declining populations starting about now. Asian countries will follow, and only the continent of Africa will be growing by mid-century.

No-one remembers a man called Paul Ehrlich. He wrote a book in the 1970s, The Population Bomb, in which he posited the decline of humans because we were too numerous. In fact, time will show that he was 180 degrees out with his predictions, that our biggest problems will come simply from there being too few of us.

I'm going to counter his Population Bomb idiocy with a theory of my own. By 2050, the most valuable event on earth will be a natural pregnancy. We might live to regret that male pill.



Bottoms Up, Conceptors.

Pinball Wizard

We spend time thinking about the first date and we spend time imagining a relationship, so let's begin to fill the gap between those two points.

First dates receive attention for the obvious reason: it's officially the start of something, even if nobody knows what. They are shiny and exciting, like taking a new iPhone out of the box, turning it over in our hands, feeling its heft and texture. 

Second, third and fourth dates do not have that same sense of magic. A person can only be new once. However, the greatest satisfaction often comes with figuring out the features of that iPhone; ditto the qualities of the new person. (Calling them "features" takes the person-as-device idea too far, don't you think?)

Let's also consider that someone's first date might have come on a bad day for them. Or they might have been at the top of their game. Either way, it's an information point that only subsequent dates can put in perspective. If that person made an impression worthy of a second and third date, at least figure on them being different - better or worse - than the first time. No-one is ever exactly the same day after day.

Whenever I think of myself going on a date, I try to figure out how I will come across to her. I know my behaviour extremes, how good my company can be on my best day, and how bad my company can be on my worst. We all pinball within a mood and response range. The idea of my dating approach is to figure out if her mood and response range fits mine. It's that lock and key thing again.


I think this is the value of those first handful of times spent together. We all more become the person we really are, which then places that first date more accurately into the big picture. That's why a variety of venues, times and type of date is important. You're attempting to provoke a reaction in your prospective beau, creating a set of data points. Wow, that sounds mercenary when written like that. Still, it's true.
 
No-one said dating was for the timid.



Bottoms Up, Behavioural Scientists.