Break-Up City, Population: A Lot.

What proportion of break-ups are amicable, do you think? One-half? A quarter? Ten percent? Five percent? Five total?

My guess is fewer than one in twenty bust-ups are mutually agreeable to the point where the two people involved are happy with the decision after two weeks. I base this on my best analysis of the asymmetry of most relationships, which in normal language means that one person is always more into it than the other. That's the point of stress in all our dealings on this quasi-romantic level - inequality of expectation.

There is no way around this notion that most relationships are pretty much doomed from the beginning. If you're a serial monogamist, you're living in a neighbourhood full of cul-de-sacs and regular, non-French dead-ends. It's the way the town-planner - the devil himself - designed it. If you want a continual stream of new lovers in your life, the price you pay is the angst and dislocation of perpetually reaching the end of the road, sometimes pretty soon after taking the turn.

Sure, some roads don't reveal themselves as going nowhere until quite some time later. That means when you do come to the "Wrong Way: Turn Around" sign, the break-up will be even more tearful, the recriminations way more cutting, and the hurt much longer lasting.

And I don't buy the whole schtick about women being more affected by a busted relationship than men. There are cold, callous women just as there are flippant, uncaring men, for whom a break-up is just another speed bump. Men and women process and reflect the consequences of the end of an affair (in the widest sense) differently. From that stems the different ways we communicate our emotions to the world. Even though men will use bravado through the loss, their dislocation is no less painful. Endless talking and re-hashing isn't our style.

There is a way out of this neo-modern hook-up and dump city. But for me to tell you would be presumptuous in the extreme.



Bottoms Up, Turn and Burners.

Throw Your Arms Around Me

Of all the motivations that keep couples together, I suspect that love - in the sense of romantic love - is the least important. Anyone who has lived through at least one love and falling-out-of-love cycle understands the temporary nature of heart-pounding irrational obsessional love. It's a trick of nature to get us to breed, asap.

So what does keep people together? Despite media hysteria, lots of people find, marry, mate, and stick with one person for many years, if not forever. The secret must partly revolve around choosing the right person in the first place. That choice can naturally be driven by emotion, but relationships so founded require lots o' luck to last longer than their season.

Choosing well means asking difficult questions. All the love in the world won't overcome disagreements over all the other stuff of life, a partial list of which might look like:

~ religion
~ money
~ children
~ politics
~ morality
~ work ethic
~ physical fitness
~ recreation
~ socializing

And so on. No two people will ever agree completely on everything - knowing what are not, and what are deal-breakers is the most important part of all this. That requires clarity on the self-knowledge front, which is quite another field of exploration.

Presuming you choose well and find someone with whom the day-to-day stuff is close to frictionless, there's one more factor that I've learned, and it's this: Happiness and longevity in a relationship occur when folks wake up in the morning and ask themselves how they can make their partner's day better. It might only be making them a morning cup of tea, or sending a chirpy upbeat text for no reason, but the very act of placing someone else's wellbeing ahead of your own creates the right framework.

I think.



Bottoms Up, Huggers.

Friday Fluffer - Make Love Not Porn

Ashley Tisdale

The crack-addictive nature of porn for guys is the never-ending stream of new, easy trim. Just one more pussy can be more tempting than any woman will ever understand.

Until now.

I think Cindy might have run smack bang into the middle of something sticky that she didn't like.

Cindy Gallop's TED talk.

And here's her (awfully designed but interesting) website. Make Love Not Porn.



Bottoms Up, Pron-Stars.

Being In The Moment, Until the End.

Morgane Slemp pic credit.

Is dating an extended job interview or an end unto itself? If it's an interview, what is the job? And if dating's the thing, why is it so fraught?

~/\~

In my experience, whenever people talk about their dating lives, there's a whisper of unfulfillment in the air. They drift off into an unspoken wistfulness, eg:


Oh, we're dating. Nothing serious... or

Yep, been dating a year or so now....

It's never (apart from initially)

OMG! I love it! We're dating!*

~/\~

Mismatched intentions doom many budding romances. It's the question everyone loathes, viz:

Where are we going with this?

If either dater feels the need to ask this question, it's over. If he or she doesn't communicate clearly some kind of goal that's vaguely related to yours, without prompting, asking the question merely emphasizes likely relationship termination.

~/\~

It's possible that I, like many others, am brainwashed into thinking that dating is only ever a road to somewhere else. Dating as its own reward can work, but requires the kind of communication rarely seen when people first meet and want to make matters more formal.

Kate, I want to spend more time with you, to date you. However, at this point I have no interest nor plans beyond that. All good with you?

Or

Doug, just date me. That's all I want.

~/\~

* Granted, beyond a certain age, this might be the case.

Bottoms Up, Existentialists.

Friday Fluffer - It's Just A Weird Situation All Round

Elle Macpherson pic credit.

Not that Elle would ever be a fluffer. Although who knows what floats her 155' boat?

For the last Friday Fluffer of 2011, I give you the BEST way yet discovered to create pet names. Actually, I'm serious. This works, if only for a laugh. SFW.





Bottoms Up Sexy Candy Pandas.

But Then Again, Too Few to Mention

Maria Grazia Cucinotta pic. 

Choosing the right partner.

I don't know, if there is some secret to making this happen, it's surely not in my possession. The answer is tantalizingly close, like she's so almost there...but she's not.

Or is she?

I am unmarried because I have yet to meet the right person. Well, maybe I've met her, but all the folderol surrounding dating is a barrier. Some people are ready, some people are not, and so the world turns.

Maturity matters. Some people I know married early in life, but they had it together enough to make it work. On the other hand, there are perpetually lagging souls who only present as decent prospects after a few years in oak barrels. Everyone's mileage varies.

If there is magic to be learned, maybe it is just that - that we're all different, and you knowing when you're ready for decanting is paramount.



Bottoms Up, Vignerons.

BTW, here's how to choose a wedding day limousine.

Digital Love Analogue

 Stephanie Gateshet.

We're clearly moving from centuries of an analogue world to lives defined digitally. The changes are easy to see - we no longer measure, we count;  infinite shading is now thin slicing; perhaps is either on/off.

If this isn't the revolution of all revolutions, I don't know what is.

But, like, whatever. My interest lies in whether we're changing the nature of love. Is love analogue or digital? Do we look at love like a Caravaggio or a PDF file? Is the answer as obvious as it seems?

Digital love sounds awful. A bunch of ones and zeros on a wafer of silicon won't get anyone's heart racing, let alone inspire them to write a song or pen poetry. However, those ones and zeros are canny things; they understand that they're neither warm nor sexy, so they present us with a more lovable facade. The photo above, for instance. Or blogs. Or iTunes. Somewhere along the line, the digital gods found themselves a first-rate PR firm, and followed its advice.

The problem is that all their solutions are good at describing love but hopeless at actually being it. The look that melts your heart, the feeling of her touch, the invisible communication of minds in synch - I guess a robot will eventually simulate these things, but it will still be reproduction of love, not the core.

So I think we're safe for now. Love will be analogue for a long time, probably until your DNA has sex with an iPad, at which point we're all screwed. Or apped. But at that point it won't matter: we'll all be too busy shopping at Amazon for a lover to notice.




Bottoms Up, Microprocessors.

Never Look a Gift Babe in the Brain

Mr Nights' comment yesterday neatly captured one segment of men's response to women.

Never look a gift babe in the brain translated means if she's willing to have sex, the conversation won't matter. So we don't worry about it.

Compartmentalization rules. Women will fall into a few obvious categories, with some variation from man to man. Women will be:

-> for sex and sex-related activities if it's clear that's what they want.

-> for company and conversation if they mesh with our intellectual/physical interests.

-> for fun and amusement if our senses of humour are compatible.

-> for marriage and procreation if our spirits are synchronous.

Overlaps occur; think of them as interconnecting doors between compartments.

In a perfect world one woman would fulfill all of our needs, or, to complete the metaphor, fill all our compartments.

I have a half-formed idea that we can have sex with all of the woman-types, but that might be because I'm tired. We probably even attempt relationships (longer than a few shags) with one-compartment women, with predictable results. These are doomed.

Realistically, a decent level of all four compatibilities should be the minimum for an attempt at something serious. Figuring out that kind of thing takes time...and really, who has the patience for that stuff thesedays?





Bottoms Up, Compartmentalists!

Why can't I save her?

I note a thread in my dating history that I guess some others know too. It's the state of mind that says:

There's a girl I think needs help. I can save her.

It's a foolish way of thinking, but for a long time I couldn't quantify why it doesn't work. Experience taught me that people change only when they want to; the impetus for doing so must come wholly from within. Knowing that someone would benefit from help is different from them deciding to change.

The decision process I figured out is to never commit to someone more than they commit to themselves.

This is one more of those life lessons that would have been handy to learn by instruction rather than repeated mistakes.




Bottoms Up, Lifesavers!





Photo courtesy of the Ocean City Sentinel. [link]

Edited for clarity.

Siege

A marriage or LTR might be done, over, cooked and stinking up the joint, but no-one is allowed to say so until one or other of the participants says it first.

This public defense of the widely held private opinion is the same mentality that those under siege take. Stalingrad in World War II springs to mind, or Boston in 1775/6.

Gradually the food runs short, so less and less to eat becomes acceptable. (Marriage equivalent: progressively less communication.)

Gradually the fuel runs short, so colder days and nights are taken for granted. (Marriage equivalent: sex becomes less frequent, more perfunctory.)

Gradually the participants daydream about better times, willing the reality to be different. (Marriage equivalent: resorting to drink or drugs or anonymous sex outside the relationship.)

To outside observers this is as obvious as Mick Jagger's lips. We know what's happening in the lives of those close to us nearly as soon as they do, and acknowledge it (out of their hearing) much sooner.

No-one outside a relationship can ever know all the ins-and-outs, but dispassionate onlookers have the advantage of perspective. Nature apparently sets us up to defend indefensible positions - or nearly indefensible, because although the Americans won the siege of Boston, the Germans failed to take Stalingrad. But do you really want to go through that kind of epic horror?[link]





Revolutionary War spy pic from here [link]

Memories of Lovers Past

Some people have the happy knack of remaining friends with past loves. I think this mostly applies to men, but that's only for lack of pertinent women-data in my life.

It is possible that women react more negatively emotionally to break-ups because they attach more, earlier. (See the Ten Date Rule/oxytocin phenomenon.) Heat surrounding relationship termination works against friendly post-breakup contact.

On the other hand it might be because men don't give what they consider minor breakups emotional fuel. Until we (men) are significantly meshed, changing relationship status from 'lover' to 'friend' is as consequential as changing gears. Either that or we mask whatever we are feeling.

Generalizations and guesses, all. My own circumstance is a combination of:

~ bad breakup technique (the fadeout, the walkout)

~ breakup sloth (delayed, forgotten, deliberately avoided breakups)

~ relationship misjudgment (I didn't realize I was in one)

~ good breakups (with bad after-relationship service)







Pic from here [link]

Edited for incorrect use of 'mitigate'. Many, many demerit points.

Ten Date Rule Part One. [link]
Ten Date Rule Part Two [link]
Ten Date Rule Overview (later) [link]