Disbelief

Photo of Miss Shahi from here.

I shake my head and close my eyes in disbelief at how we proceed to find partners. We go looking - actively looking - for complete strangers and give them the once-over with an eye to compatibility. We imagine, project, hope, wish, long, mask and guess our way to deciding that he or she might be a good-un, despite evidence to the contrary.

I'm criticizing me and my own behaviour, in which I can confidently assume others indulge.

From my own experience, a few words from someone familiar with dating and mating ins-and-outs would have been infinitely valuable. Parents are supposed to give us a clue about all this...a problematic concept if ever. Relationship education exists, but we need to learn earlier than the point at which, say, I would turn to self-help books or seek the advice of trusted peers.

So that's the thing - trial and error, mistakes and recovery, and hope and optimism are the three Donkeys of Dating Discovery, and 'twas ever thus.

Or is that six donkeys?




Bottoms Up, Eternal Learners.

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!

Dating Types

Click to enlarge, Possums.



Bottoms Up, Dating Pool!

Can we leave the light on?

Laughable.

Can we leave the light on?

Well, yeah, otherwise how will I be able to see what I'm doing?





Bottoms Up, Ninjas!



Ronin thanks to [link]

Friends With Benefits

Her: I thought you wanted to be my boyfriend?

Wombat: I do.

Her: When?

Wombat: Not right now.


Expectations kill relationships. They're the rocks that wreck super-tankers and sailing boats alike. No relationship is safe from them, and no chart shows them all. GPS works perfectly most of the time, but without knowledge of where not to go, metre-accuracy will only tell you precisely where you ran aground.

The ocean called "Friends With Benefits" is one with an unusually jagged coastline. As enticing as the concept appears, I fear most of us compartmentalize the 'friends' and the 'benefits' as if they can be. Like a watercolour Venn Diagram in the rain, those two can only bleed into each other with potentially messy results. Art is rarely the outcome.

Doc30ty highlights my point in her post. [link] Her male FWB half clearly didn't include exclusivity in his mental image of FWB. His thinking was more Benefits with a Friend, dare I say an expectation at variance with that of our beloved Doc30ty.

There are three ways to find a FWB relationship:

Friends first -> add benefits.

Simultaneous creation of friendship including benefits.

Beneficiaries first -> add friendship.

Is one way better than another? That's not for me to decide. What experience tells me is that my expectations will differ from my lady friend's, and the problem with that is that we both think there won't be any complications arising therefrom.

This is the temptation of the FWB deal: the simplicity of it appeals mightily, but it's impossible for any of us to not expect stuff beyond the raw acronym. We set sail in light winds and smooth seas but wake that night to the sound of crashing waves on gnarly rocks.



Bottoms Up, Landlubbers!



Diagram from here [link]

Edited for tense and incorrect plurals, as well as overuse of 'variance' - the usual thesaurus of Wombat idiocies.

Sticky

Wet-spot and post-bonk jokes aside, there's a kind of cosmic glue that holds people together.

You know the kind of glue you buy at the hardware store to repair stuff you've broken at home? The kind that costs a mint and requires two tubes of foul-smelling, vaguely dangerous-looking goo? Well, dating is the process of mixing the two parts of this Love Epoxy together. We squeeze, mix, apply, clamp, wait, and at some point you'll figure out if you're attached to the other person or not.

Unfortunately, even the best glue can come unstuck. Just as when you repair that lamp or piece of crockery, relationships can split along the same axis to which you applied the sticky stuff in the first place. This is not pessimism. It is simply an observation of change within relationships that we're powerless to stop.

The upside is that if one epoxy formula loses its 'stick' there are always other combinations that will work. In fact, I'd say that relationship maintenance - the same as preventive maintenance on your car - is all about exploring other kinds of glue. Experimenting with small amounts of other compounds can be fun, and might lead you to lots of different ways to stay together.

Fitting together's great, but sticking together's good too.



Pic from here.[link]

Stereotypical until you're not.

Characterizing people by way of a generalization works like any generalization - it must be accompanied by the rider that it is being used to communicate a big idea, and that individual cases will almost always vary. If you know anything about quantum mechanics, you'll see the connection here. In general, we know what an electron is doing, but we can only specifically nail down one of its two properties. We know either its momentum or its position, but not both.

It might be stretching matters to equate (perceived) human characteristics with quantum effects but it forces us to see a couple of points.

One, that language is important but imperfect.

Two, that language isn't what's real, it is merely a one dimensional snapshot of either a specific or a general idea.

So, what's this got to do with stereotypes? Well, they're useful, for a start. We all know what we mean when I refer to someone as a 'Jock'. But there will be considerable variation between each of the individual cases we conjur in our brains. (Many of us will be relying on the media here, specifically Hollywood, as a Jock is a peculiarly American case.) The Hollywood reference is important, because only in movies does the perfect Jock exist. In the real world, he's a mix of many different characteristics.

Stereotypes are valuable as long as we understand they work despite possibly having no examples actually existing. Our brains are agile enough to get that, in my opinion, because we recognize that matter is infinitely more complex than language, but that language is essential for communicating the complex.